The Haunted Bookshop Christopher Morley (sci fi books to read TXT) 📖

in darkness; in others where lamps were glowing he could see a table and chairs. In one corner, under a sign lettered “Essays,” an elderly gentleman was reading, with a face of fanatical ecstasy illumined by the sharp glare of electricity; but there was no wreath of smoke about him so the newcomer concluded he was not the proprietor.

As the young man approached the back of the shop the general effect became more and more fantastic. On some skylight far overhead he could hear the rain drumming; but otherwise the place was completely silent, peopled only (so it seemed) by the gurgitating whorls of smoke and the bright profile of the essay reader. It seemed like a secret fane, some shrine of curious rites, and the young man’s throat was tightened by a stricture which was half agitation and half tobacco. Towering above him into the gloom were shelves and shelves of books, darkling toward the roof. He saw a table with a cylinder of brown paper and twine, evidently where purchases might be wrapped; but there was no sign of an attendant.

“This place may indeed be haunted,” he thought, “perhaps by the delighted soul of Sir Walter Raleigh, patron of the weed, but seemingly not by the proprietors.”

His eyes, searching the blue and vaporous vistas of the shop, were caught by a circle of brightness that shone with a curious egg-like lustre. It was round and white, gleaming in the sheen of a hanging light, a bright island in a surf of tobacco smoke. He came more close, and found it was a bald head.

This head (he then saw) surmounted a small, sharp-eyed man who sat tilted back in a swivel chair, in a corner which seemed the nerve centre of the establishment. The large pigeonholed desk in front of him was piled high with volumes of all sorts, with tins of tobacco and newspaper clippings and letters. An antiquated typewriter, looking something like a harpsichord, was half-buried in sheets of manuscript. The little bald-headed man was smoking a corncob pipe and reading a cookbook.

“I beg your pardon,” said the caller, pleasantly; “is this the proprietor?”

Mr. Roger Mifflin, the proprietor of Parnassus at Home, looked up, and the visitor saw that he had keen blue eyes, a short red beard, and a convincing air of competent originality.

“It is,” said Mr. Mifflin. “Anything I can do for you?”

“My name is Aubrey Gilbert,” said the young man. “I am representing the Grey-Matter Advertising Agency. I want to discuss with you the advisability of your letting us handle your advertising account, prepare snappy copy for you, and place it in large circulation mediums. Now the war’s over, you ought to prepare some constructive campaign for bigger business.”

The bookseller’s face beamed. He put down his cookbook, blew an expanding gust of smoke, and looked up brightly.

“My dear chap,” he said, “I don’t do any advertising.”

“Impossible!” cried the other, aghast as at some gratuitous indecency.

“Not in the sense you mean. Such advertising as benefits me most is done for me by the snappiest copywriters in the business.”

“I suppose you refer to Whitewash and Gilt?” said Mr. Gilbert wistfully.

“Not at all. The people who are doing my advertising are Stevenson, Browning, Conrad and Company.”

“Dear me,” said the Grey-Matter solicitor. “I don’t know that agency at all. Still, I doubt if their copy has more pep than ours.”

“I don’t think you get me. I mean that my advertising is done by the books I sell. If I sell a man a book by Stevenson or Conrad, a book that delights or terrifies him, that man and that book become my living advertisements.”

“But that word-of-mouth advertising is exploded,” said Gilbert. “You can’t get distribution that way. You’ve got to keep your trademark before the public.”

“By the bones of Tauchnitz!” cried Mifflin. “Look here, you wouldn’t go to a doctor, a medical specialist, and tell him he ought to advertise in papers and magazines? A doctor is advertised by the bodies he cures. My business is advertised by the minds I stimulate. And let me tell you that the book business is different from other trades. People don’t know they want books. I can see just by looking at you that your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully unaware of it! People don’t go to a bookseller until some serious mental accident or disease makes them aware of their danger. Then they come here. For me to advertise would be about as useful as telling people who feel perfectly well that they ought to go to the doctor. Do you know why people are reading more books now than ever before? Because the terrific catastrophe of the war has made them realize that their minds are ill. The world was suffering from all sorts of mental fevers and aches and disorders, and never knew it. Now our mental pangs are only too manifest. We are all reading, hungrily, hastily, trying to find out⁠—after the trouble is over⁠—what was the matter with our minds.”

The little bookseller was standing up now, and his visitor watched him with mingled amusement and alarm.

“You know,” said Mifflin, “I am interested that you should have thought it worth while to come in here. It reinforces my conviction of the amazing future ahead of the book business. But I tell you that future lies not merely in systematizing it as a trade. It lies in dignifying it as a profession. It is small use to jeer at the public for craving shoddy books, quack books, untrue books. Physician, cure thyself! Let the bookseller learn to know and revere good books, he will teach the customer. The hunger for good books is more general and more insistent than you would dream. But it is still in a way subconscious. People need books, but they don’t know they need them. Generally they are not aware that the books they need are in existence.”

“Why wouldn’t advertising be the way to let them know?” asked the young