The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley (top non fiction books of all time txt) 📖

had made on her was one of superfluous dinginess, and as Mrs. Mifflin refused to let her help get breakfast—except set out the salt cellars— she ran down Gissing Street to a little florist’s shop she had noticed the previous afternoon. Here she spent at least a week’s salary in buying chrysanthemums and a large pot of white heather. She was distributing these about the shop when Roger found her.

“Bless my soul!” he said. “How are you going to live on your wages if you do that sort of thing? Pay-day doesn’t come until next Friday!”

“Just one blow-out,” she said cheerfully. “I thought it would be fun to brighten the place up a bit. Think how pleased your floorwalker will be when he comes in!”

“Dear me,” said Roger. “I hope you don’t really think we have floorwalkers in the second-hand book business.”

After breakfast he set about initiating his new employee into the routine of the shop. As he moved about, explaining the arrangement of his shelves, he kept up a running commentary.

“Of course all the miscellaneous information that a bookseller has to have will only come to you gradually,” he said. “Such tags of bookshop lore as the difference between Philo Gubb and Philip Gibbs, Mrs. Wilson Woodrow and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, and all that sort of thing. Don’t be frightened by all the ads you see for a book called “Bell and Wing,” because no one was ever heard to ask for a copy. That’s one of the reasons why I tell Mr. Gilbert I don’t believe in advertising. Someone may ask you who wrote The Winning of the Best, and you’ll have to know it wasn’t Colonel Roosevelt but Mr. Ralph Waldo Trine. The beauty of being a bookseller is that you don’t have to be a literary critic: all you have to do to books is enjoy them. A literary critic is the kind of fellow who will tell you that Wordsworth’s Happy Warrior is a poem of 85 lines composed entirely of two sentences, one of 26 lines and one of 59. What does it matter if Wordsworth wrote sentences almost as long as those of Walt Whitman or Mr. Will H. Hays, if only he wrote a great poem? Literary critics are queer birds. There’s Professor Phelps of Yale, for instance. He publishes a book in 1918 and calls it The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century. To my way of thinking a book of that title oughtn’t to be published until 2018. Then somebody will come along and ask you for a book of poems about a typewriter, and by and by you’ll learn that what they want is Stevenson’s Underwoods. Yes, it’s a complicated life. Never argue with customers. Just give them the book they ought to have even if they don’t know they want it.”

They went outside the front door, and Roger lit his pipe. In the little area in front of the shop windows stood large empty boxes supported on trestles. “The first thing I always do–-,” he said.

“The first thing you’ll both do is catch your death of cold,” said Helen over his shoulder. “Titania, you run and get your fur. Roger, go and find your cap. With your bald head, you ought to know better!”

When they returned to the front door, Titania’s blue eyes were sparkling above her soft tippet.

“I applaud your taste in furs,” said Roger. “That is just the colour of tobacco smoke.” He blew a whiff against it to prove the likeness. He felt very talkative, as most older men do when a young girl looks as delightfully listenable as Titania.

“What an adorable little place,” said Titania, looking round at the bookshop’s space of private pavement, which was sunk below the street level. “You could put tables out here and serve tea in summer time.”

“The first thing every morning,” continued Roger, “I set out the tencent stuff in these boxes. I take it in at night and stow it in these bins. When it rains, I shove out an awning, which is mighty good business. Someone is sure to take shelter, and spend the time in looking over the books. A really heavy shower is often worth fifty or sixty cents. Once a week I change my pavement stock. This week I’ve got mostly fiction out here. That’s the sort of thing that comes in in unlimited numbers. A good deal of it’s tripe, but it serves its purpose.”

“Aren’t they rather dirty?” said Titania doubtfully, looking at some little blue Rollo books, on which the siftings of generations had accumulated. “Would you mind if I dusted them off a bit?”

“It’s almost unheard of in the second-hand trade,” said Roger; “but it might make them look better.”

Titania ran inside, borrowed a duster from Helen, and began housecleaning the grimy boxes, while Roger chatted away in high spirits. Bock already noticing the new order of things, squatted on the doorstep with an air of being a party to the conversation. Morning pedestrians on Gissing Street passed by, wondering who the bookseller’s engaging assistant might be. “I wish I could find a maid like that,” thought a prosperous Brooklyn housewife on her way to market. “I must ring her up some day and find out how much she gets.”

Roger brought out armfuls of books while Titania dusted.

“One of the reasons I’m awfully glad you’ve come here to help me,” he said, “is that I’ll be able to get out more. I’ve been so tied down by the shop, I haven’t had a chance to scout round, buy up libraries, make bids on collections that are being sold, and all that sort of thing. My stock is running a bit low. If you just wait for what comes in, you don’t get much of the really good stuff.”

Titania was polishing a copy of The Late Mrs. Null. “It must be wonderful to have read so many books,” she said. “I’m afraid I’m not a very deep reader, but at any rate Dad has taught me a respect for good books. He gets so mad because when my friends come to the house, and he asks them what they’ve been reading, the only thing they seem to know about is Dere Mable.”

Roger chuckled. “I hope you don’t think I’m a mere highbrow,” he said. “As a customer said to me once, without meaning to be funny, ‘I like both the Iliad and the Argosy.’ The only thing I can’t stand is literature that is unfairly and intentionally flavoured with vanilla. Confectionery soon disgusts the palate, whether you find it in Marcus Aurelius or Doctor Crane. There’s an odd aspect of the matter that sometimes strikes me: Doc Crane’s remarks are just as true as Lord Bacon’s, so how is it that the Doctor puts me to sleep in a paragraph, while my Lord’s essays keep me awake all night?”

Titania, being unacquainted with these philosophers, pursued the characteristic feminine course of clinging to the subject on which she was informed. The undiscerning have called this habit of mind irrelevant, but wrongly. The feminine intellect leaps like a grasshopper; the masculine plods as the ant.

“I see there’s a new Mable book coming,” she said. “It’s called That’s Me All Over Mable, and the newsstand clerk at the Octagon says he expects to sell a thousand copies.”

“Well, there’s a meaning in that,” said Roger. “People have a craving to be amused, and I’m sure I don’t blame ‘em. I’m afraid I haven’t read Dere Mable. If it’s really amusing, I’m glad they read it. I suspect it isn’t a very great book, because a Philadelphia schoolgirl has written a reply to it called Dere Bill, which is said to be as good as the original. Now you can hardly imagine a Philadelphia flapper writing an effective companion to Bacon’s Essays. But never mind, if the stuff’s amusing, it has its place. The human yearning for innocent pastime is a pathetic thing, come to think about it. It shows what a desperately grim thing life has become. One of the most significant things I know is that breathless, expectant, adoring hush that falls over a theatre at a Saturday matinee, when the house goes dark and the footlights set the bottom of the curtain in a glow, and the latecomers tank over your feet climbing into their seats–-”

“Isn’t it an adorable moment!” cried Titania.

“Yes, it is,” said Roger; “but it makes me sad to see what tosh is handed out to that eager, expectant audience, most of the time. There they all are, ready to be thrilled, eager to be worked upon, deliberately putting themselves into that glorious, rare, receptive mood when they are clay in the artist’s hand—and Lord! what miserable substitutes for joy and sorrow are put over on them! Day after day I see people streaming into theatres and movies, and I know that more than half the time they are on a blind quest, thinking they are satisfied when in truth they are fed on paltry husks. And the sad part about it is that if you let yourself think you are satisfied with husks, you’ll have no appetite left for the real grain.”

Titania wondered, a little panic-stricken, whether she had been permitting herself to be satisfied with husks. She remembered how greatly she had enjoyed a Dorothy Gish film a few evenings before. “But,” she ventured, “you said people want to be amused. And if they laugh and look happy, surely they’re amused?”

“They only think they are!” cried Mifflin. “They think they’re amused because they don’t know what real amusement is! Laughter and prayer are the two noblest habits of man; they mark us off from the brutes. To laugh at cheap jests is as base as to pray to cheap gods. To laugh at Fatty Arbuckle is to degrade the human spirit.”

Titania thought she was getting in rather deep, but she had the tenacious logic of every healthy girl. She said:

“But a joke that seems cheap to you doesn’t seem cheap to the person who laughs at it, or he wouldn’t laugh.”

Her face brightened as a fresh idea flooded her mind:

“The wooden image a savage prays to may seem cheap to you, but it’s the best god he knows, and it’s all right for him to pray to it.”

“Bully for you,” said Roger. “Perfectly true. But I’ve got away from the point I had in mind. Humanity is yearning now as it never did before for truth, for beauty, for the things that comfort and console and make life seem worth while. I feel this all round me, every day. We’ve been through a frightful ordeal, and every decent spirit is asking itself what we can do to pick up the fragments and remould the world nearer to our heart’s desire. Look here, here’s something I found the other day in John Masefield’s preface to one of his plays: ‘The truth and rapture of man are holy things, not lightly to be scorned. A carelessness of life and beauty marks the glutton, the idler, and the fool in their deadly path across history.’ I tell you, I’ve done some pretty sober thinking as I’ve sat here in my bookshop during the past horrible years. Walt Whitman wrote a little poem during the Civil War—Year that trembled and reeled beneath me, said Walt, Must I learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled, and sullen hymns of defeat?—I’ve sat here in my shop at night, and looked round at my shelves, looked at all the brave books that house the hopes and gentlenesses and dreams of men and women, and wondered if they were all wrong, discredited, defeated. Wondered if the world were still merely a jungle of fury. I think I’d have gone balmy if