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# 2025-03-26 - The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley
The Haunted Bookshop is a sequel to Parnassus On Wheels. Both books
express much enthusiasm for literature.
The Haunted Bookshop mentions various genres, then lists authors and
books that fall under each. I found this a valuable introduction to
authors of the early 20th century. I prefer it very much compared to
the soulless AI-generated synopses on the Project Gutenberg web site.
Below is a table contrasting the two books.
Parnassus On Wheels The Haunted Bookshop
------------------------------ ------------------------------
Narrated by Helen Multiple narrators by chapter
Set before World War I Set after World War I
Vagabond adventure Mystery & romance
Selling books to farmers Selling to Brooklyn city folk
What follows are spoilers and interesting excepts from the book.
* * *
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.
Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good'
book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or
refutes some human error. A book that is good for me would very
likely be punk for you.
The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder
still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is the
greater explosive: it will win.
Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives.
Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the
world--the brains of men. I can spend a rainy afternoon reading, and
my mind works itself up to such a passion and anxiety over mortal
problems as almost unmans me. It is terribly nerve-racking.
Librarians invented that soothing device for the febrifuge of their
souls, just as I fall back upon the rites of the kitchen. Librarians
would all go mad, those capable of concentrated thought, if they did
not have the cool and healing card index as medicament!
* * *
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.
* * *
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--
* * *
To say that he [Aubrey] was thinking of Miss Chapman would imply too
much power of ratiocination and abstract scrutiny on his part. He was
not thinking: he was being thought. Down the accustomed channels of
his intellect he felt his mind ebbing with the irresistible movement
of tides drawn by the blandishing moon. And across these shimmering
estuaries of impulse his will, a lost and naked athlete, was
painfully attempting to swim, but making much leeway and already
almost resigned to being carried out to sea.
* * *
"... 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! ..."
"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."
"You see, books contain the thoughts and dreams of men, their hopes
and strivings and all their immortal parts. It's in books that most
of us learn how splendidly worth-while life is."
* * *
[After watching The Return of Tarzan in the movie theater: ]
walk off the screen and tread on us."
"I never can understand," said Helen, "why they don't film some of
the really good books--think of Frank Stockton's stuff, how
delightful that would be."
[Hear hear!]
* * *
Whom can I curse, whom can I judge, when we are all alike
unfortunate? Suffering is universal; hands are outstretched to each
other, and when they touch ... the great solution will come. My heart
is aglow, and I stretch out my hand and cry, "Come, let us join
hands! I love you, I love you!"
And of course, as soon as one puts one's self in that frame of mind
someone comes along and picks your pocket... I suppose we must teach
ourselves to be too proud to mind having our pockets picked!
* * *
Henry Adams puts it tersely. He says the human mind appears suddenly
and inexplicably out of some unknown and unimaginable void. It passes
half its known life in the mental chaos of sleep. Even when awake it
is a victim of its own ill-adjustment, of disease, of age, of
external suggestion, of nature's compulsions; it doubts its own
sensations and trusts only in instruments and averages. After sixty
years or so of growing astonishment the mind wakes to find itself
looking blankly into the void of death. And, as Adams says, that it
should profess itself pleased by this performance is all that the
highest rules of good breeding can ask. That the mind should actually
be satisfied would prove that it exists only as idiocy!
* * *
There are two theories as to this subject of ice-box plundering, one
of the husband and the other of the wife. Husbands are prone to think
(in their simplicity) that if they take a little of everything
palatable they find in the refrigerator, but thus distributing their
forage over the viands the general effect of the depradation will be
almost unnoticeable. Whereas wives say (and Mrs. Mifflin had often
explained to Roger) that it is far better to take all of any one dish
than a little of each; for the latter course is likely to diminish
each item below the bulk at which it is still useful as a left-over.
Roger, however, had the obstinate viciousness of all good husbands,
and he knew the delights of cold provender by heart. ... This is a
custom which causes the housewife to be confronted the next morning
with a tragical vista of pathetic scraps. Two slices of beet in a
little earthenware cup, a sliver of apple pie one inch wide, three
prunes lowly nestling in a mere trickle of their own syrup, and a
tablespoonful of stewed rhubarb where had been one of those yellow
basins nearly full--what can the most resourceful kitcheneer do with
these oddments? This atrocious practice cannot be too bitterly
condemned.
[Hear, hear!]
* * *
Thus, in hours of stress, do all men turn for comfort to their chosen
art. The poet, battered by fate, heals himself in the niceties of
rhyme. The prohibitionist can weather the blackest melancholia by
meditating the contortions of other people's abstinence. The most
embittered citizen of Detroit will never perish by his own hand while
he has an automobile to tinker.
* * *
Along these historic shelves many troubled spirits have come as near
happiness as they are like to get... for after all, happiness (as the
mathematicians might say) lies on a curve, and we approach it only by
asymptote...
* * *
The explosion has blown out a whole lot of books I had forgotten
about and didn't even know I had. Look, here's an old copy of How to
Be Happy Though Married, which I see the publisher lists as
'Fiction.' Here's Urn Burial, and The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac,
and Mistletoe's Book of Deplorable Facts. I'm going to have a
thorough house-cleaning.
author: Morley, Christopher, 1890-1957
(TXT) detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/The_Haunted_Bookshop
LOC: PZ3.M8265 H9 PS3525.O71
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tags: ebook,fiction
title: The Haunted Bookshop
# Tags
(DIR) ebook
(DIR) fiction