Book-Destiny
A remembrance of bookselling past, in the form of two twenty-year-old introductions to a pair of one-hundred-year-old novels.
1: Parnassus on Wheels
You may not remember it by the time you read this, but for generations before the rise of behemoth bookstore chains, before the current, internet-bewitched interest in the fortunes of the trade made it a daily focus of the business press, bookselling was a quiet, romantic pursuit. Dusty one might even call it, with both wonder and affection, for no treasure is ever newly minted: dust is the soil in which all discovery is planted, and discovery is, or should be, the root and flower of any bookshop.
Indeed, what is a bookshop if not a place of discovery? As a London bookseller once put it, there should be that feeling of coming on something that in the back of your mind you knew you always wanted. I’m sure Roger Mifflin, the protagonist of Christopher Morley’s two charming bookselling novels, Parnassus on Wheels and its sequel The Haunted Bookshop, would voice hearty agreement. And, drawing on his pipe (and his seemingly bottomless well of hour-enhancing argument), he’d likely elaborate on the idea to suggest that books discover us as much as we discover them: they crouch in corners, secrete themselves along the shelves, lie in wait in libraries until we’re ready for their wisdom — then they spring their wits upon us. Worthy books have a way of coming to hand when a reader is ripe for them. Such serendipity* is the browser’s faith, and solace.
“Did you ever notice how books track you down and hunt you out?” Mifflin asks in The Haunted Bookshop. “It’s one of the uncanniest things I know to follow a real book on its career — it follows you and follows you and drives you into a corner and makes you read it. . . . Words can’t describe the cunning of some books. You’ll think you’ve shaken them off your trail, and then one day some innocent looking customer will pop in and begin to talk, and you’ll know he’s an unconscious agent of book-destiny.”
Mifflin, of course, is very much a conscious agent of “book-destiny.” When we meet him at the beginning of Parnassus on Wheels, he is navigating his Travelling Parnassus through the gate of the McGill farm. His horse-drawn wagon — “a queer wagon,” the no-nonsense narrator, Helen McGill, informs us, “shaped like a van,” “coloured a pale, robin’s-egg blue” and sporting a scarlet-lettered sign advertising “Good Books for Sale: Shakespeare, Charles Lamb, R. L. S., Hazlitt, and All Others” — hides within its flanks rows and rows of volumes old and new. He has, he explains to Miss McGill, spent the best part of seven years cruising the east coast of America, from Florida to Maine, dispensing literature, and the advice and adventure it conveys, with a missionary zeal. “Lord!,” he will soon tell Helen, “when you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue — you sell him a whole new life. Love and humour and friendship and ships at sea by night — there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book, I mean.” The “whole new life” Travelling Parnassus delivers to Helen McGill provides the captivating comedy that drives Parnassus on Wheels, and the role of a self-described “bald-headed fool over forty selling books on a country road” in one woman’s revolt goes far beyond what either Roger or Helen is bound to expect.
Originally published in 1917, Christopher Morley’s love letter to the traffic in books remains a charming and transporting entertainment; like its sequel, it captures as winningly as any work I know the dusty — and by now almost bygone — allure of the bookseller’s art. It also satisfies the broader demands of its narrator, the sagacious, albeit unbookish, Helen McGill: “A good book ought to have something simple about it. And, like Eve, it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it. A story that’s all forehead doesn’t amount to much.” In its quiet, romantic way, Parnassus on Wheels amounts to a good deal.
2: The Haunted Bookshop
One of my favorite pastimes — it is, in fact, a sort of solitaire, in which books assume the place of playing cards, with letters, stories, poems, and memoirs standing in for hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades — is the maintenance of an imaginary bookcase. This small stack of shelves and its carefully chosen contents belong to an equally imaginary, yet nonetheless gracious guest bedroom that lies somewhere beneath (in space) and beyond (in time) the parking lot for toys that currently qualifies as our home’s hosting pad. No matter, the books in mind are real enough to me, and I take endless pains to balance their qualities so that our phantom visitors will be treated to an inviting menu of the pleasures to be taken between covers. Large questions of reading matter and moment are entertained as I select and arrange these bedside companions: do I opt for diverting tales or absorbing tomes? For prose that teases or that tranquilizes? Is it best that essays plumb pools of meditation, or merely skim their surface with wit and clever commentary? Are dreams deepened by weighty thoughts or leavened by light reading? Should the words I wish upon my guests induce sleep or encourage the dangerous intrigue of insomnia? It’s a game that gives a diverting outward cast to a lifetime’s inward occupation, and one I suspect that’s played, in some form or another, by anyone who trades in books.
It is certainly played in a spirited fashion by Roger Mifflin in Chapter III of The Haunted Bookshop, as he prepares a spare bedroom for his new shop assistant, Miss Titania Chapman, in the “comfortable old brown-stone” dwelling he shares with his wife, the former Helen McGill (with whom readers of Morley’s first Mifflin novel, Parnassus on Wheels, are already well-acquainted). In addition to living quarters, of course, the Mifflins’ Brooklyn brownstone houses — in “warm and comfortable obscurity, a kind of drowsy dusk” — Parnassus at Home, the stationary incarnation of the itinerant literary tabernacle that gave the earlier book its name. Having hung some pictures on the walls of his acolyte’s new quarters, Mifflin “bethought himself of the books that should stand on the bedside shelf,” devoting the “delighted hours of the morning” to consideration of what to put there. What follows is as careful a disquisition on the subject of the “proper books for a guest-room” — “a question that admits of the utmost nicety of discussion” — as one is ever likely to come across, one that not only generates a list of alluring titles that will send you scurrying to your own favorite sources of secondhand books, but also speaks volumes about the bookseller’s faith in the life-enhancing force these titles represent.
Such faith, after all, is the animating spirit of The Haunted Bookshop, despite the very real diversion and suspense delivered by the novel’s capering plot, in which an ambitious (albeit unlettered) advertising man, Mr. Aubrey Gilbert, woos a comely young heiress (Miss Chapman) by doggedly uncovering the designs of nefarious foreign agents operating just down the block from Mifflin’s den of serenity.** While Gilbert is busy deciphering the perilous puzzle he has stumbled upon, whose pieces include a local druggist, hotel chefs, and, largest and most mysterious of all, a vanishing copy of Thomas Carlyle’s edition of Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, Mifflin goes about his bookish business, celebrating, with his “convincing air of competent originality,” the magic and motive power of books. His enthusiasm is of course endorsed and abetted by Morley himself, who allows his erudite protagonist to offer diagnoses (“I can see just by looking at you that your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully unaware of it!”) and prescriptions (“If your mind needs phosphorous, try Trivia by Logan Pearsall Smith. If your mind needs a whiff of strong air, blue and cleansing, from hilltops and primrose valleys, try The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies. If your mind needs a tonic of iron and wine, and a thorough rough-and-tumbling, try Samuel Butler’s Notebooks or The Man Who Was Thursday, by Chesterton”) that will cheer the heart of any book-besotted reader. To say nothing of the happy lessons Mifflin imparts to Titania as he extemporizes an introductory course in the art of bookselling, or the trade-based disputations of the convention of his colleagues — “The Corn Cob Club” — assembled in Chapter II (the latter half of which, Morley coyly advises us, “may be omitted by all readers who are not booksellers”).
In short, for all the entertainment one can take in the pages of The Haunted Bookshop and its predecessor (and the pleasures they proffer are considerable), the enduring delights of both novels belong to their unabashed and merry exaltation of books. The romance of the bookshop (with the attendant charms of dust and discovery, study and serendipity, the errors of pursuit and the truths of apprehension — “We have what you want, though you may not know you want it”) is nowhere better caught than in the environs of Roger Mifflin’s humble Parnassus, and most often on his own tongue. “To spread good books about,” he tells Titania, “to sow them on fertile minds, to propagate understanding and a carefulness of life and beauty, isn’t that high enough mission for a man?” From where I sit, I can only hope — no, trust — that it is.
That books can influence, amuse, enhance, intensify, heal, even determine our lives is the ardent message wrapped within the warm folds of this cozy tale. Like ghosts, books haunt us. Which is why the ones placed on a bedside shelf must be chosen carefully; in the rooms within my ken, it goes without saying, such a fateful selection is bound to include both The Haunted Bookshop and Parnassus on Wheels.
* A word coined, in a letter, by Horace Walpole, who formed it from the title of the fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip (Serendip being a former name for Ceylon, now Sri Lanka), the heroes of which “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” I offer the etymology of serendipity here in deference to the wishes of Roger Mifflin, who would certainly volunteer it himself if he were able to do so, and because it is the kind of happy erudition that graces the pages of Christopher Morley’s books.
** Written in the roiling wake of World War I (it was originally published in 1919), The Haunted Bookshop evinces contemporary animus toward the German enemy — “You Hun!” Gilbert dubs the tale’s villain — as well as revealing the author’s remarkably prescient reading of the troubles that would plague the hatching peace.
