The Haunted Bookshop, Christopher Morley [best romance ebooks TXT] 📗

the Age of Queen Elizabeth. Remind me to lock it up somewhere, will you?”

This secret masterpiece by Mark Twain was one of the bookseller’s treasures. Not even Helen had ever been permitted to read it; and she had shrewdly judged that it was not in her line, for though she knew perfectly well where he kept it (together with his life insurance policy, some Liberty Bonds, an autograph letter from Charles Spencer Chaplin, and a snapshot of herself taken on their honeymoon) she had never made any attempt to examine it.

“Well,” said Helen; “Titania or no Titania, if the Corn Cobs want their chocolate cake tonight, I must get busy. Take my suitcase upstairs like a good fellow.”

A gathering of booksellers is a pleasant sanhedrim to attend. The members of this ancient craft bear mannerisms and earmarks just as definitely recognizable as those of the cloak and suit business or any other trade. They are likely to be a little⁠—shall we say⁠—worn at the bindings, as becomes men who have forsaken worldly profit to pursue a noble calling ill rewarded in cash. They are possibly a trifle embittered, which is an excellent demeanour for mankind in the face of inscrutable heaven. Long experience with publishers’ salesmen makes them suspicious of books praised between the courses of a heavy meal.

When a publisher’s salesman takes you out to dinner, it is not surprising if the conversation turns toward literature about the time the last of the peas are being harried about the plate. But, as Jerry Gladfist says (he runs a shop up on Thirty-Eighth Street) the publishers’ salesmen supply a long-felt want, for they do now and then buy one a dinner the like of which no bookseller would otherwise be likely to commit.

“Well, gentlemen,” said Roger as his guests assembled in his little cabinet, “it’s a cold evening. Pull up toward the fire. Make free with the cider. The cake’s on the table. My wife came back from Boston specially to make it.”

“Here’s Mrs. Mifflin’s health!” said Mr. Chapman, a quiet little man who had a habit of listening to what he heard. “I hope she doesn’t mind keeping the shop while we celebrate?”

“Not a bit,” said Roger. “She enjoys it.”

“I see Tarzan of the Apes is running at the Gissing Street movie palace,” said Gladfist. “Great stuff. Have you seen it?”

“Not while I can still read The Jungle Book,” said Roger.

“You make me tired with that talk about literature,” cried Jerry. “A book’s a book, even if Harold Bell Wright wrote it.”

“A book’s a book if you enjoy reading it,” amended Meredith, from a big Fifth Avenue bookstore. “Lots of people enjoy Harold Bell Wright just as lots of people enjoy tripe. Either of them would kill me. But let’s be tolerant.”

“Your argument is a whole succession of non sequiturs,” said Jerry, stimulated by the cider to unusual brilliance.

“That’s a long putt,” chuckled Benson, the dealer in rare books and first editions.

“What I mean is this,” said Jerry. “We aren’t literary critics. It’s none of our business to say what’s good and what isn’t. Our job is simply to supply the public with the books it wants when it wants them. How it comes to want the books it does is no concern of ours.”

“You’re the guy that calls bookselling the worst business in the world,” said Roger warmly, “and you’re the kind of guy that makes it so. I suppose you would say that it is no concern of the bookseller to try to increase the public appetite for books?”

“Appetite is too strong a word,” said Jerry. “As far as books are concerned the public is barely able to sit up and take a little liquid nourishment. Solid foods don’t interest it. If you try to cram roast beef down the gullet of an invalid you’ll kill him. Let the public alone, and thank God when it comes round to amputate any of its hard-earned cash.”

“Well, take it on the lowest basis,” said Roger. “I haven’t any facts to go upon⁠—”

“You never have,” interjected Jerry.

“But I’d like to bet that the trade has made more money out of Bryce’s American Commonwealth than it ever did out of all Parson Wright’s books put together.”

“What of it? Why shouldn’t they make both?”

This preliminary tilt was interrupted by the arrival of two more visitors, and Roger handed round mugs of cider, pointed to the cake and the basket of pretzels, and lit his corncob pipe. The new arrivals were Quincy and Fruehling; the former a clerk in the book department of a vast drygoods store, the latter the owner of a bookshop in the Hebrew quarter of Grand Street⁠—one of the best-stocked shops in the city, though little known to uptown book-lovers.

“Well,” said Fruehling, his bright dark eyes sparkling above richly tinted cheekbones and bushy beard, “what’s the argument?”

“The usual one,” said Gladfist, grinning, “Mifflin confusing merchandise with metaphysics.”

Mifflin

Not at all. I am simply saying that it is good business to sell only the best.

Gladfist

Wrong again. You must select your stock according to your customers. Ask Quincy here. Would there be any sense in his loading up his shelves with Maeterlinck and Shaw when the department-store trade wants Eleanor Porter and the Tarzan stuff? Does a country grocer carry the same cigars that are listed on the wine card of a Fifth Avenue hotel? Of course not. He gets in the cigars that his trade enjoys and is accustomed to. Bookselling must obey the ordinary rules of commerce.

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