[War Ration Stamps]

As if those two books my grandmother gave me weren't fascinating enough, leafing through them unearthed other treasures, slipped between the pages over the years.

A yellowed advertisement for a bottled remedy called Le Contre-Coups de l'Abbé Perdrigeon (Abbot Perdrigeon's back-kick), which will help you recover from heavy falls and blows, brain congestion, apoplexy, and will ease the pain from arthritis, rhumatisms, hypertension, and miscellaneous maladies de la cinquantaine, those ailments that hit you in your fifties.

An ...