The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley (parable of the sower read online TXT) 📕

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 comeback 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 focused 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