It is always intriguing to find something hidden in a book. Any fragment can become a clue to a past life, past place and past owner.

This brings me to the business card of a Mr. Noel Monks which was found in a book left for the rubbish tip, on a skip in Richmond, Melbourne. It was rescued before any weather damage could spoil it and brought home to join my reasonably out-of-control library and it has been sitting there ever since with ephemera intact. This ephemera includes a few intriguing keepsakes that hint at this books journey to the present day.

The book is titled The Birth of the Ballet Russes first published in1936 and given as a present in 1937 to a lady name Viva. The business card was inserted at pages p152 -153. I like to think that was where Mr. Monks had read up to as his message states, typed and signed on the back of his card.

World's best city - I like that sentiment. I also love a mystery so I decided to find out a little about Mr. Monks and Viva and the bon voyage.

Noel Monks was an Australian war correspondent and is not to be confused with Noel Monk the Sex Pistols' American tour manager.

Monks reported from Guernica in 1937 when the city was attacked by Nazi planes. He was the first journalist on the scene and he reported the horror of the first city to be wiped out by aerial bombing. The Nazi's, it was later stated by Hermann Goering at his trial for war crimes, used the town to experiment with their bombs and gain practice for WWII. There were casualties and it was an atrocity. The reaction of Pablo Picasso was to paint his nightmarish vision of the tragedy in the painting "Guernica".

Here is a quote from a Noel Monks report of the time, Guernica, 1937.

In the Plaza, surrounded almost by a wall of fire, were about a hundred refugees. They were wailing and weeping and rocking to and fro. One middle-aged man spoke English. He told me: 'At four, before the-market closed, many aeroplanes came. They dropped bombs. Some came low and shot bullets into the streets. Father Aroriategui was wonderful. He prayed with the people in the Plaza while the bombs fell.'..*

Whilst working for the Daily Express Monks met and married a fellow war correspondent named Mary Welsh. Their marriage lasted until Mary fell in love with Ernest Hemingway. She went on to become the fourth and last wife of Mr. Hemingway, after divorcing Monks in 1946. So there is the link between this discarded book in Melbourne, an Australian journalist and one of the most highly esteemed American writers of the last century.

It is amazing what you can trace from a forgotten card in a book. I tried to search, so far in vain, for Viva and establish her relationship with Mr. Monks. In some ways she is far more interesting to me being an unknown. It was her book on the ballet she loaned to Noel Monks to read. That the book is her's is clear from the inscription inside the cover and other pieces of ephemera that remain. It is interesting that she kept his note in the book or did she forget about it? When did she and her book part company?

As for the bon voyage...his note suggests that she was overseas at one point and was to return home to Melbourne hence "Bon voyage....My love to Melbourne, world's best city/".

Important things and trivial things find their way between the pages of a book. Tram tickets as bookmarks, photos and hidden documents - I like to carry on this tradition and leave things between the pages now and then only to be surprised by them, sometimes years later. I have lost things this way too.

I regret leaving behind a bunch of four leaf clovers which I pressed in a book that belonged to my partner of the time. They were given to me by an old lady who had found them growing in a laneway. She walked into where I was working and handed them to me as though it was the most normal thing to find so many rare four leaf clovers in an undisclosed laneway nearby. She gave them to me because I was young, because she thought I might like them. Now they are gone.They were forgotten in the rush to move on with life. Maybe someone will open his book sometime in the future and speculate on their lucky find.

*Guernica, 1937," EyeWitness to History, www.eyewitnesstohistory.com (2005).