Books: The Haunted Bookshop
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Christopher Morley >> The Haunted Bookshop
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MIFFLIN--A fig for the ordinary rules of commerce!
I came over here to Gissing Street to get away from them.
My mind would blow out its fuses if I had to abide by the dirty little
considerations of supply and demand. As far as I am concerned,
supply CREATES demand.
GLADFIST--Still, old chap, you have to abide by the dirty little
consideration of earning a living, unless someone has endowed you?
BENSON--Of course my line of business isn't strictly the same as you
fellows'. But a thought that has often occurred to me in selling
rare editions may interest you. The customer's willingness to part
with his money is usually in inverse ratio to the permanent benefit
he expects to derive from what he purchases.
MEREDITH--Sounds a bit like John Stuart Mill.
BENSON--Even so, it may be true. Folks will pay a darned sight
more to be amused than they will to be exalted. Look at the way
a man shells out five bones for a couple of theatre seats, or spends
a couple of dollars a week on cigars without thinking of it.
Yet two dollars or five dollars for a book costs him positive anguish.
The mistake you fellows in the retail trade have made is in
trying to persuade your customers that books are necessities.
Tell them they're luxuries. That'll get them! People have to work
so hard in this life they're shy of necessities. A man will go on
wearing a suit until it's threadbare, much sooner than smoke a
threadbare cigar.
GLADFIST--Not a bad thought. You know, Mifflin here calls me a
material-minded cynic, but by thunder, I think I'm more idealistic than
he is. I'm no propagandist incessantly trying to cajole poor innocent
customers into buying the kind of book _I_ think they ought to buy.
When I see the helpless pathos of most of them, who drift into
a bookstore without the slightest idea of what they want or what is
worth reading, I would disdain to take advantage of their frailty.
They are absolutely at the mercy of the salesman. They will buy
whatever he tells them to. Now the honourable man, the high-minded man
(by which I mean myself) is too proud to ram some shimmering stuff
at them just because he thinks they ought to read it. Let the boobs
blunder around and grab what they can. Let natural selection operate.
I think it is fascinating to watch them, to see their helpless groping,
and to study the weird ways in which they make their choice.
Usually they will buy a book either because they think the jacket
is attractive, or because it costs a dollar and a quarter instead
of a dollar and a half, or because they say they saw a review of it.
The "review" usually turns out to be an ad. I don't think one
book-buyer in a thousand knows the difference.
MIFFLIN--Your doctrine is pitiless, base, and false! What would
you think of a physician who saw men suffering from a curable
disease and did nothing to alleviate their sufferings?
GLADFIST--Their sufferings (as you call them) are nothing to what
mine would be if I stocked up with a lot of books that no one
but highbrows would buy. What would you think of a base public
that would go past my shop day after day and let the high-minded
occupant die of starvation?
MIFFLIN--Your ailment, Jerry, is that you conceive yourself as
merely a tradesman. What I'm telling you is that the bookseller
is a public servant. He ought to be pensioned by the state.
The honour of his profession should compel him to do all he can
to spread the distribution of good stuff.
QUINCY--I think you forget how much we who deal chiefly in new books
are at the mercy of the publishers. We have to stock the new stuff,
a large proportion of which is always punk. Why it is punk,
goodness knows, because most of the bum books don't sell.
MIFFLIN--Ah, that is a mystery indeed! But I can give you
a fair reason. First, because there isn't enough good stuff
to go round. Second, because of the ignorance of the publishers,
many of whom honestly don't know a good book when they see it.
It is a matter of sheer heedlessness in the selection of what they
intend to publish. A big drug factory or a manufacturer of a
well-known jam spends vast sums of money on chemically assaying
and analyzing the ingredients that are to go into his medicines
or in gathering and selecting the fruit that is to be stewed
into jam. And yet they tell me that the most important department
of a publishing business, which is the gathering and sampling
of manuscripts, is the least considered and the least remunerated.
I knew a reader for one publishing house: he was a babe recently
out of college who didn't know a book from a frat pin. If a jam
factory employs a trained chemist, why isn't it worth a publisher's
while to employ an expert book analyzer? There are some of them.
Look at the fellow who runs the Pacific Monthly's book business
for example! He knows a thing or two.
CHAPMAN--I think perhaps you exaggerate the value of those
trained experts. They are likely to be fourflushers. We had
one once at our factory, and as far as I could make out he never
thought we were doing good business except when we were losing money.
MIFFLIN--As far as I have been able to observe, making money is
the easiest thing in the world. All you have to do is to turn out
an honest product, something that the public needs. Then you have
to let them know that you have it, and teach them that they need it.
They will batter down your front door in their eagerness to get it.
But if you begin to hand them gold bricks, if you begin to sell them books
built like an apartment house, all marble front and all brick behind,
you're cutting your own throat, or rather cutting your own pocket,
which is the same thing.
MEREDITH--I think Mifflin's right. You know the kind of place
our shop is: a regular Fifth Avenue store, all plate glass front
and marble columns glowing in the indirect lighting like a birchwood
at full moon. We sell hundreds of dollars' worth of bunkum every day
because people ask for it; but I tell you we do it with reluctance.
It's rather the custom in our shop to scoff at the book-buying
public and call them boobs, but they really want good books--
the poor souls don't know how to get them. Still, Jerry has a certain
grain of truth to his credit. I get ten times more satisfaction
in selling a copy of Newton's The Amenities of Book-Collecting
than I do in selling a copy of--well, Tarzan; but it's poor
business to impose your own private tastes on your customers.
All you can do is to hint them along tactfully, when you get a chance,
toward the stuff that counts.
QUINCY--You remind me of something that happened in our book
department the other day. A flapper came in and said she had
forgotten the name of the book she wanted, but it was something about
a young man who had been brought up by the monks. I was stumped.
I tried her with The Cloister and the Hearth and Monastery Bells
and Legends of the Monastic Orders and so on, but her face was blank.
Then one of the salesgirls overheard us talking, and she guessed it
right off the bat. Of course it was Tarzan.
MIFFLIN--You poor simp, there was your chance to introduce her
to Mowgli and the bandar-log.
QUINCY--True--I didn't think of it.
MIFFLIN--I'd like to get you fellows' ideas about advertising.
There was a young chap in here the other day from an advertising agency,
trying to get me to put some copy in the papers. Have you found that
it pays?
FRUEHLING--It always pays--somebody. The only question is,
does it pay the man who pays for the ad?
MEREDITH--What do you mean?
FRUEHLING--Did you ever consider the problem of what I call
tangential advertising? By that I mean advertising that benefits
your rival rather than yourself? Take an example. On Sixth
Avenue there is a lovely delicatessen shop, but rather expensive.
Every conceivable kind of sweetmeat and relish is displayed in
the brightly lit window. When you look at that window it simply
makes your mouth water. You decide to have something to eat.
But do you get it there? Not much! You go a little farther
down the street and get it at the Automat or the Crystal Lunch.
The delicatessen fellow pays the overhead expense of that beautiful
food exhibit, and the other man gets the benefit of it.
It's the same way in my business. I'm in a factory district,
where people can't afford to have any but the best books.
(Meredith will bear me out in saying that only the wealthy can afford
the poor ones.) They read the book ads in the papers and magazines, the ads
of Meredith's shop and others, and then they come to me to buy them.
I believe in advertising, but I believe in letting someone else pay
for it.
MIFFLIN--I guess perhaps I can afford to go on riding on Meredith's ads.
I hadn't thought of that. But I think I shall put a little notice
in one of the papers some day, just a little card saying
PARNASSUS AT HOME
GOOD BOOKS BOUGHT
AND SOLD
THIS SHOP IS HAUNTED
It will be fun to see what come-back I get.
QUINCY--The book section of a department store doesn't get much
chance to enjoy that tangential advertising, as Fruehling calls it.
Why, when our interior decorating shark puts a few volumes of a pirated
Kipling bound in crushed oilcloth or a copy of "Knock-kneed Stories,"
into the window to show off a Louis XVIII boudoir suite,
display space is charged up against my department! Last summer
he asked me for "something by that Ring fellow, I forget the name,"
to put a punchy finish on a layout of porch furniture. I thought
perhaps he meant Wagner's Nibelungen operas, and began to dig them out.
Then I found he meant Ring Lardner.
GLADFIST--There you are. I keep telling you bookselling is an
impossible job for a man who loves literature. When did a bookseller
ever make any real contribution to the world's happiness?
MIFFLIN--Dr. Johnson's father was a bookseller.
GLADFIST--Yes, and couldn't afford to pay for Sam's education.
FRUEHLING--There's another kind of tangential advertising that
interests me. Take, for instance, a Coles Phillips painting for some
brand of silk stockings. Of course the high lights of the picture are
cunningly focussed on the stockings of the eminently beautiful lady;
but there is always something else in the picture--an automobile
or a country house or a Morris chair or a parasol--which makes it
just as effective an ad for those goods as it is for the stockings.
Every now and then Phillips sticks a book into his paintings,
and I expect the Fifth Avenue book trade benefits by it.
A book that fits the mind as well as a silk stocking does the ankle
will be sure to sell.
MIFFLIN--You are all crass materialists. I tell you, books are
the depositories of the human spirit, which is the only thing
in this world that endures. What was it Shakespeare said--
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme--
By the bones of the Hohenzollerns, he was right! And wait a minute!
There's something in Carlyle's Cromwell that comes back to me.
He ran excitedly out of the room, and the members of the Corn Cob
fraternity grinned at each other. Gladfist cleaned his pipe and
poured out some more cider. "He's off on his hobby," he chuckled.
"I love baiting him."
"Speaking of Carlyle's Cromwell," said Fruehling, "that's a book
I don't often hear asked for. But a fellow came in the other
day hunting for a copy, and to my chagrin I didn't have one.
I rather pride myself on keeping that sort of thing in stock.
So I called up Brentano's to see if I could pick one up, and they told
me they had just sold the only copy they had. Somebody must have
been boosting Thomas! Maybe he's quoted in Tarzan, or somebody has
bought up the film rights."
Mifflin came in, looking rather annoyed.
"Here's an odd thing," he said. "I know damn well that copy
of Cromwell was on the shelf because I saw it there last night.
It's not there now."
"That's nothing," said Quincy. "You know how people come into
a second-hand store, see a book they take a fancy to but don't
feel like buying just then, and tuck it away out of sight or on
some other shelf where they think no one else will spot it,
but they'll be able to find it when they can afford it.
Probably someone's done that with your Cromwell."
"Maybe, but I doubt it," said Mifflin. "Mrs. Mifflin says
she didn't sell it this evening. I woke her up to ask her.
She was dozing over her knitting at the desk. I guess she's tired
after her trip."
"I'm sorry to miss the Carlyle quotation," said Benson.
"What was the gist?"
"I think I've got it jotted down in a notebook," said Roger,
hunting along a shelf. "Yes, here it is." He read aloud:
"The works of a man, bury them under what guano-mountains and
obscene owl-droppings you will, do not perish, cannot perish.
What of Heroism, what of Eternal Light was in a Man and his Life,
is with very great exactness added to the Eternities, remains forever
a new divine portion of the Sum of Things.
"Now, my friends, the bookseller is one of the keys in that universal
adding machine, because he aids in the cross-fertilization of men
and books. His delight in his calling doesn't need to be stimulated
even by the bright shanks of a Coles Phillips picture.
"Roger, my boy," said Gladfist, "your innocent enthusiasm makes me think
of Tom Daly's favourite story about the Irish priest who was rebuking
his flock for their love of whisky. 'Whisky,' he said, 'is the bane
of this congregation. Whisky, that steals away a man's brains.
Whisky, that makes you shoot at landlords--and not hit them!'
Even so, my dear Roger, your enthusiasm makes you shoot at truth
and never come anywhere near it."
"Jerry," said Roger, "you are a upas tree. Your shadow is poisonous!"
"Well, gentlemen," said Mr. Chapman, "I know Mrs. Mifflin wants to be
relieved of her post. I vote we adjourn early. Your conversation
is always delightful, though I am sometimes a bit uncertain
as to the conclusions. My daughter is going to be a bookseller,
and I shall look forward to hearing her views on the business."
As the guests made their way out through the shop, Mr. Chapman drew
Roger aside. "It's perfectly all right about sending Titania?"
he asked.
"Absolutely," said Roger. "When does she want to come?"
"Is to-morrow too soon?"
"The sooner the better. We've got a little spare room upstairs that she
can have. I've got some ideas of my own about furnishing it for her.
Send her round to-morrow afternoon."
Chapter III
Titania Arrives
The first pipe after breakfast is a rite of some importance
to seasoned smokers, and Roger applied the flame to the bowl
as he stood at the bottom of the stairs. He blew a great gush
of strong blue reek that eddied behind him as he ran up the flight,
his mind eagerly meditating the congenial task of arranging the little
spare room for the coming employee. Then, at the top of the steps,
he found that his pipe had already gone out. "What with filling
my pipe and emptying it, lighting it and relighting it," he thought,
"I don't seem to get much time for the serious concerns of life.
Come to think of it, smoking, soiling dishes and washing them,
talking and listening to other people talk, take up most of
life anyway."
This theory rather pleased him, so he ran downstairs again to tell
it to Mrs. Mifflin.
"Go along and get that room fixed up," she said, "and don't try
to palm off any bogus doctrines on me so early in the morning.
Housewives have no time for philosophy after breakfast."
Roger thoroughly enjoyed himself in the task of preparing
the guest-room for the new assistant. It was a small chamber
at the back of the second storey, opening on to a narrow passage
that connected through a door with the gallery of the bookshop.
Two small windows commanded a view of the modest roofs of that
quarter of Brooklyn, roofs that conceal so many brave hearts,
so many baby carriages, so many cups of bad coffee, and so many
cartons of the Chapman prunes.
"By the way," he called downstairs, "better have some of the prunes
for supper to-night, just as a compliment to Miss Chapman."
Mrs. Mifflin preserved a humorous silence.
Over these noncommittal summits the bright eye of the bookseller,
as he tacked up the freshly ironed muslin curtains Mrs. Mifflin
had allotted, could discern a glimpse of the bay and the
leviathan ferries that link Staten Island with civilization.
"Just a touch of romance in the outlook," he thought to himself.
"It will suffice to keep a blasee young girl aware of the excitements
of existence."
The room, as might be expected in a house presided over by Helen Mifflin,
was in perfect order to receive any occupant, but Roger had volunteered
to psychologize it in such a fashion as (he thought) would convey
favourable influences to the misguided young spirit that was to be
its tenant. Incurable idealist, he had taken quite gravely his
responsibility as landlord and employer of Mr. Chapman's daughter.
No chambered nautilus was to have better opportunity to expand
the tender mansions of its soul.
Beside the bed was a bookshelf with a reading lamp.
The problem Roger was discussing was what books and pictures
might be the best preachers to this congregation of one.
To Mrs. Mifflin's secret amusement he had taken down the picture
of Sir Galahad which he had once hung there, because (as he had said)
if Sir Galahad were living to-day he would be a bookseller.
"We don't want her feasting her imagination on young Galahads,"
he had remarked at breakfast. "That way lies premature matrimony.
What I want to do is put up in her room one or two good prints
representing actual men who were so delightful in their day that all
the young men she is likely to see now will seem tepid and prehensile.
Thus she will become disgusted with the present generation of youths
and there will be some chance of her really putting her mind on the
book business."
Accordingly he had spent some time in going through a bin where he kept
photos and drawings of authors that the publishers' "publicity men"
were always showering upon him. After some thought he discarded
promising engravings of Harold Bell Wright and Stephen Leacock,
and chose pictures of Shelley, Anthony Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson,
and Robert Burns. Then, after further meditation, he decided that
neither Shelley nor Burns would quite do for a young girl's room,
and set them aside in favour of a portrait of Samuel Butler.
To these he added a framed text that he was very fond of and had hung
over his own desk. He had once clipped it from a copy of Life and
found much pleasure in it. It runs thus:
ON THE RETURN OF A BOOK
LENT TO A FRIEND
I GIVE humble and hearty thanks for the safe return of this
book which having endured the perils of my friend's bookcase,
and the bookcases of my friend's friends, now returns to me
in reasonably good condition.
I GIVE humble and hearty thanks that my friend did not see fit to give
this book to his infant as a plaything, nor use it as an ash-tray
for his burning cigar, nor as a teething-ring for his mastiff.
WHEN I lent this book I deemed it as lost: I was resigned
to the bitterness of the long parting: I never thought to look
upon its pages again.
BUT NOW that my book is come back to me, I rejoice and am exceeding glad!
Bring hither the fatted morocco and let us rebind the volume
and set it on the shelf of honour: for this my book was lent,
and is returned again.
PRESENTLY, therefore, I may return some of the books that I myself
have borrowed.
"There!" he thought. "That will convey to her the first element
of book morality."
These decorations having been displayed on the walls, he bethought
himself of the books that should stand on the bedside shelf.
This is a question that admits of the utmost nicety of discussion.
Some authorities hold that the proper books for a guest-room are
of a soporific quality that will induce swift and painless repose.
This school advises The Wealth of Nations, Rome under the Caesars,
The Statesman's Year Book, certain novels of Henry James, and The
Letters of Queen Victoria (in three volumes). It is plausibly
contended that books of this kind cannot be read (late at night)
for more than a few minutes at a time, and that they afford useful scraps
of information.
Another branch of opinion recommends for bedtime reading short stories,
volumes of pithy anecdote, swift and sparkling stuff that may keep one
awake for a space, yet will advantage all the sweeter slumber in the end.
Even ghost stories and harrowing matter are maintained seasonable
by these pundits. This class of reading comprises O. Henry, Bret Harte,
Leonard Merrick, Ambrose Bierce, W. W. Jacobs, Daudet, de Maupassant,
and possibly even On a Slow Train Through Arkansaw, that grievous classic
of the railway bookstalls whereof its author, Mr. Thomas W. Jackson,
has said "It will sell forever, and a thousand years afterward."
To this might be added another of Mr. Jackson's onslaughts on the
human intelligence, I'm From Texas, You Can't Steer Me, whereof is said
(by the author) "It is like a hard-boiled egg, you can't beat it."
There are other of Mr. Jackson's books, whose titles escape memory,
whereof he has said "They are a dynamite for sorrow."
Nothing used to annoy Mifflin more than to have someone come in and
ask for copies of these works. His brother-in-law, Andrew McGill,
the writer, once gave him for Christmas (just to annoy him)
a copy of On a Slow Train Through Arkansaw sumptuously bound
and gilded in what is known to the trade as "dove-coloured ooze."
Roger retorted by sending Andrew (for his next birthday)
two volumes of Brann the Iconoclast bound in what Robert Cortes
Holliday calls "embossed toadskin." But that is apart from
the story.
To the consideration of what to put on Miss Titania's bookshelf Roger
devoted the delighted hours of the morning. Several times Helen
called him to come down and attend to the shop, but he was sitting
on the floor, unaware of numbed shins, poring over the volumes he had
carted upstairs for a final culling. "It will be a great privilege,"
he said to himself, "to have a young mind to experiment with.
Now my wife, delightful creature though she is, was--well,
distinctly mature when I had the good fortune to meet her;
I have never been able properly to supervise her mental processes.
But this Chapman girl will come to us wholly unlettered. Her father
said she had been to a fashionable school: that surely is a guarantee
that the delicate tendrils of her mind have never begun to sprout.
I will test her (without her knowing it) by the books I put here for her.
By noting which of them she responds to, I will know how to proceed.
It might be worth while to shut up the shop one day a week in order
to give her some brief talks on literature. Delightful! Let me see,
a little series of talks on the development of the English novel,
beginning with Tom Jones--hum, that would hardly do! Well, I have
always longed to be a teacher, this looks like a chance to begin.
We might invite some of the neighbours to send in their children once
a week, and start a little school. Causeries du lundi, in fact!
Who knows I may yet be the Sainte Beuve of Brooklyn."
Across his mind flashed a vision of newspaper clippings--"This
remarkable student of letters, who hides his brilliant parts
under the unassuming existence of a second-hand bookseller,
is now recognized as the----"
"Roger!" called Mrs. Mifflin from downstairs: "Front! someone
wants to know if you keep back numbers of Foamy Stories."
After he had thrown out the intruder, Roger returned to his meditation.
"This selection," he mused, "is of course only tentative.
It is to act as a preliminary test, to see what sort of thing
interests her. First of all, her name naturally suggests Shakespeare
and the Elizabethans. It's a remarkable name, Titania Chapman:
there must be great virtue in prunes! Let's begin with a volume
of Christopher Marlowe. Then Keats, I guess: every young person
ought to shiver over St. Agnes' Eve on a bright cold winter evening.
Over Bemerton's, certainly, because it's a bookshop story.
Eugene Field's Tribune Primer to try out her sense of humour.
And Archy, by all means, for the same reason. I'll go down and get the
Archy scrapbook."
It should be explained that Roger was a keen admirer of Don Marquis,
the humourist of the New York Evening Sun. Mr. Marquis once lived
in Brooklyn, and the bookseller was never tired of saying that he was
the most eminent author who had graced the borough since the days
of Walt Whitman. Archy, the imaginary cockroach whom Mr. Marquis
uses as a vehicle for so much excellent fun, was a constant delight
to Roger, and he had kept a scrapbook of all Archy's clippings.
This bulky tome he now brought out from the grotto by his desk
where his particular treasures were kept. He ran his eye over it,
and Mrs. Mifflin heard him utter shrill screams of laughter.
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