The Haunted Bookshop quotes

If you are ever in Brooklyn, that borough of superb sunsets and magnificent vistas of husband-propelled baby-carriages, it is to be hoped you may chance upon a quiet by-street where there is a very remarkable bookshop.

This bookshop, which does business under the unusual name “Parnassus at Home,” is housed in one of the comfortable old brownstone dwellings which have been the joy of several generations of plumbers and cockroaches.

The owner of the business has been at pains to remodel the house to make it a more suitable shrine for his trade, which deals entirely in secondhand volumes.

There is no secondhand bookshop in the world more worthy of respect.

It was about six o’clock of a cold November evening, with gusts of rain splattering upon the pavement, when a young man proceeded uncertainly along Gissing Street, stopping now and then to look at shop windows as though doubtful of his way.

“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.

”

“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!

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.

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.”

But in my own case it would be futile. I am not a dealer in merchandise but a specialist in adjusting the book to the human need. 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. My pleasure is to prescribe books for such patients as drop in here and are willing to tell me their symptoms.

Some people have let their reading faculties decay so that all I can do is hold a postmortem on them. But most are still open to treatment.

There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it.

No advertisement on earth is as potent as a grateful customer.

“The first thing needed is to acquire a sense of pity. 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.

Yes, I have a few of the good books here. There are only about 30,000 really important books in the world. I suppose about 5,000 of them were written in the English language, and 5,000 more have been translated.”

“The first thing needed is to acquire a sense of pity.

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. Yes, I have a few of the good books here. There are only about 30,000 really important books in the world.

“Until ten o’clock. A great many of my best customers are those who are at work all day and can only visit bookshops at night.

The real book-lovers, you know, are generally among the humbler classes.

A man who is impassioned with books has little time or patience to grow rich by concocting schemes for cozening his fellows.”

“Far from it.

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.

“What?” cried Mifflin, in agitation, “you have not heard of Samuel Butler, the author of The Way of All Flesh? My dear young man, whoever permits himself to die before he has read that book, and also Erewhon, has deliberately forfeited his chances of paradise.

For paradise in the world to come is uncertain, but there is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.

Pour yourself another glass of wine, and permit me—”

Then a new conception of the matter struck me. It is intolerable for a human being to go on doing any task as a penance, under duress.

No matter what the work is, one must spiritualize it in some way, shatter the old idea of it into bits and rebuild it nearer to the heart’s desire.

How was I to do this with dish-washing?

Then a new conception of the matter struck me.

It is intolerable for a human being to go on doing any task as a penance, under duress.

No matter what the work is, one must spiritualize it in some way, shatter the old idea of it into bits and rebuild it nearer to the heart’s desire. How was I to do this with dish-washing?

“

When one views a stubborn fact from a new angle, it is amazing how all its contours and edges change shape!

Immediately my dishpan began to glow with a kind of philosophic halo! The warm, soapy water became a sovereign medicine to retract hot blood from the head;

“Mr. Gilbert,” he went on, “do not laugh at me when I tell you that I have evolved a whole kitchen philosophy of my own. I find the kitchen the shrine of our civilization, the focus of all that is comely in life.

The ruddy shine of the stove is as beautiful as any sunset.

A well-polished jug or spoon is as fair, as complete and beautiful, as any sonnet. The dish mop, properly rinsed and wrung and hung outside the back door to dry, is a whole sermon in itself.

I find the kitchen the shrine of our civilization, the focus of all that is comely in life. The ruddy shine of the stove is as beautiful as any sunset.

A well-polished jug or spoon is as fair, as complete and beautiful, as any sonnet.

The dish mop, properly rinsed and wrung and hung outside the back door to dry, is a whole sermon in itself.

A well-polished jug or spoon is as fair, as complete and beautiful, as any sonnet. The dish mop, properly rinsed and wrung and hung outside the back door to dry, is a whole sermon in itself.

The stars never look so bright as they do from the kitchen door after the icebox pan is emptied and the whole place is ‘redd up,’ as the Scotch say.

”

We have all sorts and conditions of booksellers: one is a fanatic on the subject of libraries. He thinks that every public library should be dynamited. Another thinks that moving pictures will destroy the book trade. What rot!

Surely everything that arouses people’s minds, that makes them alert and questioning, increases their appetite for books.

”

It may be remarked that all bookshops that are open in the evening are busy in the after-supper hours. Is it that the true book-lovers are nocturnal gentry, only venturing forth when darkness and silence and the gleam of hooded lights irresistibly suggest reading?

Certainly nighttime has a mystic affinity for literature, and it is strange that the Eskimo have created no great books.

Surely, for most of us, an arctic night would be insupportable without O. Henry and Stevenson. Or, as Roger Mifflin remarked during a passing enthusiasm for Ambrose Bierce, the true noctes ambrosianae are the noctes ambrose bierceianae.

“Roger, you blessed innocent!” cried his wife. “Life will no longer be tranquil with a girl of nineteen round the place. You may fool yourself, but you can’t fool me.

A girl of nineteen doesn’t react toward things. She explodes.

Things don’t ‘react’ anywhere but in Boston and in chemical laboratories. I suppose you know you’re taking a human bombshell into the arsenal?”

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.

Even so, it may be true.

Folks will pay a darned sight more to be amused than they will to be exalted.

Look at the way a man shells out five bones for a couple of theatre seats, or spends a couple of dollars a week on cigars without thinking of it. Yet two dollars or five dollars for a book costs him positive anguish.

Yet two dollars or five dollars for a book costs him positive anguish. The mistake you fellows in the retail trade have made is in trying to persuade your customers that books are necessities. Tell them they’re luxuries. That’ll get them!

People have to work so hard in this life they’re shy of necessities.

A man will go on wearing a suit until it’s threadbare, much sooner than smoke a threadbare cigar.

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.

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.

This is a question that admits of the utmost nicety of discussion.

Some authorities hold that the proper books for a guest room are of a soporific quality that will induce swift and painless repose.

This school advises The Wealth of Nations, Rome Under the Caesars, The Statesman’s Year Book, certain novels of Henry James, and The Letters of Queen Victoria (in three volumes).

Aubrey was vaguely aware of the rows of books, of the shining coals, of the buxom hostess and the friendly terrier; but with the intense focus of an intelligent young male mind these were all merely appurtenances to the congenial spectacle of the employee.

How quickly a young man’s senses assemble and assimilate the data that are really relevant!

Without seeming even to look in that direction he had performed the most amazing feat of lightning calculation known to the human faculties. He had added up all the young ladies of his acquaintance, and found the sum total less than the girl before him.

Although he kept late hours, Roger Mifflin was a prompt riser.

It is only the very young who find satisfaction in lying abed in the morning. Those who approach the term of the fifth decade are sensitively aware of the fluency of life, and have no taste to squander it among the blankets.

The bookseller’s morning routine was brisk and habitual. He was generally awakened about half-past seven by the jangling bell that balanced on a coiled spring at the foot of the stairs.

Then somebody will come along and ask you for a book of poems about a typewriter, and by and by you’ll learn that what they want is Stevenson’s Underwoods. Yes, it’s a complicated life.

Never argue with customers. Just give them the book they ought to have even if they don’t know they want it.

”

That’s one of the reasons why I tell Mr. Gilbert I don’t believe in advertising. Someone may ask you who wrote The Winning of the Best, and you’ll have to know it wasn’t Colonel Roosevelt but Mr. Ralph Waldo Trine.

The beauty of being a bookseller is that you don’t have to be a literary critic: all you have to do to books is enjoy them.

A literary critic is the kind of fellow who will tell you that Wordsworth’s ‘Happy Warrior’ is a poem of 85 lines composed entirely of two sentences, one of 26 lines and one of 59.

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 …

Day after day I see people streaming into theatres and movies, and I know that more than half the time they are on a blind quest, thinking they are satisfied when in truth they are fed on paltry husks.

And the sad part about it is that if you let yourself think you are satisfied with husks, you’ll have no appetite left for the real grain.

”

“They only think they are!” cried Mifflin. “They think they’re amused because they don’t know what real amusement is!

Laughter and prayer are the two noblest habits of man; they mark us off from the brutes. To laugh at cheap jests is as base as to pray to cheap gods.

To laugh at Fatty Arbuckle is to degrade the human spirit.”

“Yes, and probably George the Third called Ben Franklin a bolshevik,” retorted Roger. “

The trouble is, truth and falsehood don’t come laid out in black and white⁠—Truth and Huntruth, as the wartime joke had it.

Sometimes I thought Truth had vanished from the earth,” he cried bitterly. “Like everything else, it was rationed by the governments. I taught myself to disbelieve half of what I read in the papers. I saw the world clawing itself to shreds in blind rage.

“A cause which is so true shouldn’t need the sacrifice of millions of fine lives,” said Roger gravely. “Don’t imagine I don’t see the dreadful nobility of it.

But poor humanity shouldn’t be asked to be noble at such a cost.

That’s the most pitiful tragedy of it all. Don’t you suppose the Germans thought they too were marching off for a noble cause when they began it and forced this misery on the world? They had been educated to believe so, for a generation.

I never realized the greatness of the human spirit, the indomitable grandeur of man’s mind, until I read Milton’s Areopagitica. To read that great outburst of splendid anger ennobles the meanest of us simply because we belong to the same species of animal as Milton.

Books are the immortality of the race, the father and mother of most that is worthwhile cherishing in our hearts.

To spread good books about, 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? The bookseller is the real Mr. Valiant-For-Truth.

To read that great outburst of splendid anger ennobles the meanest of us simply because we belong to the same species of animal as Milton. Books are the immortality of the race, the father and mother of most that is worthwhile cherishing in our hearts.

To spread good books about, 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?

The bookseller is the real Mr. Valiant-For-Truth.

If humanity has sense enough to take these books to heart, it will never get itself into this mess again. Printer’s ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years.

Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.

There’s Hardy’s Dynasts for example. When you read that book you can feel it blowing up your mind. It leaves you gasping, ill, nauseated—oh, it’s not pleasant to feel some really pure intellect filtered into one’s brain! It hurts! There’s enough T.N.T.

“

Did you ever notice how books track you down and hunt you out?

They follow you like the hound in Francis Thompson’s poem. They know their quarry! Look at that book The Education of Henry Adams! Just watch the way it’s hounding out thinking people this winter.

That’s why I call this place the Haunted Bookshop. Haunted by the ghosts of the books I haven’t read. Poor uneasy spirits, they walk and walk around me.

There’s only one way to lay the ghost of a book, and that is to read it.

”

I’ve tried to escape it, but every now and then it sticks up its head somewhere. It’ll get me some day, and I’ll be compelled to read it. Ten Thousand a Year trailed me the same way until I surrendered.

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. There’s an old sea-captain who drops in here now and then.

Gissing Street was very bright and orderly in its Saturday evening bustle. Certainly it was grotesque to imagine melodrama hanging about a secondhand bookshop in Brooklyn. The revolver felt absurdly lumpy and uncomfortable in his hip pocket.

What a different aspect a little hot supper gives to affairs!

The most resolute idealist or assassin had better write his poems or plan his atrocities before the evening meal. After the narcosis of that repast the spirit falls into a softer mood, eager only to be amused.

Young men have a pioneering imagination: it is doubtful whether any young Orlando ever found himself side by side with Rosalind without dreaming himself wedded to her.

If men die a thousand deaths before this mortal coil is shuffled, even so surely do youths contract a thousand marriages before they go to the City Hall for a license.

Aubrey remembered the opera glasses, which were still in his pocket, and brought them out. The trio amused themselves by watching Sidney Drew’s face through the magnifying lenses.

“Chesterton has written a very savage poem against cocoa,” said Roger, “which you will find in The Flying Inn; but for my part I find it the ideal evening drink. It lets the mind down gently, and paves the way for slumber.

I have often noticed that the most terrific philosophical agonies can be allayed by three cups of Mrs. Mifflin’s cocoa.

A man can safely read Schopenhauer all evening if he has a tablespoonful of cocoa and a tin of condensed milk available. Of course it should be made with condensed milk, which is the only way.”

Turning to one of his favourite passages—“A Consolatory Digression, Containing the Remedies of All Manner of Discontents”—he was happily lost to all ticking of the clock, retaining only such bodily consciousness as was needful to dump, fill, and relight his pipe from time to time.

Solitude is a dear jewel for men whose days are spent in the tedious this-and-that of trade.

Roger was a glutton for his midnight musings. To such tried companions as Robert Burton and George Herbert he was wont to exonerate his spirit.

But Bock’s face always showed his tremulous eagerness to participate in the sin, and rather than have him stand by as a silent and damning critic, Roger used to give him most of the cold potato.

The censure of a dog is something no man can stand.

But I rove, as Burton would say.

Aubrey, sitting at his window with the opera glasses, soon realized that he was blind weary.

Even the exalted heroics of romance are not proof against fatigue, most potent enemy of all who do and dream.

He had had a long day, coming after the skull-smiting of the night before; it was only the frosty air at the lifted sash that kept him at all awake.

He ascended the stairs on tiptoe and found himself in the kitchen. All was quiet.

An alarm clock ticked with a stumbling, headlong hurry.

Pots of geraniums stood on the window sill. The range, with its lids off and the fire carefully nourished, radiated a mild warmth. Through a dark little pantry he entered the dining room. Still no sign of anything amiss.

“Adam and Eve Ate Prunes On Their Honeymoon” was a slogan that flashed into his head, and he imagined a magnificent painting illustrating this text.

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.

“Adam and Eve Ate Prunes On Their Honeymoon” was a slogan that flashed into his head, and he imagined a magnificent painting illustrating this text. 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.

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.

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.

Aubrey walked many miles, gradually throwing his despair to the winds. The bright spirits of Orison Swett Marden and Ralph Waldo Trine, Dioscuri of Good Cheer, seemed to be with him reminding him that nothing is impossible.

Aubrey had no idea what Leary’s was, and rather expected it to be a tavern of some sort. When he reached the place, however, he saw why his friend had suggested it as a likely lurking ground for Roger.

It would be as impossible for any bibliophile to pass this famous secondhand bookstore as for a woman to go by a wedding party without trying to see the bride.

Although it was a bleak day, and a snell wind blew down the street, the pavement counters were lined with people turning over disordered piles of volumes.

He entered eagerly, and looked about. The shop was comfortably busy, with a number of people browsing.

They seemed normal enough from behind, but in their eyes he detected the wild, peering glitter of the bibliomaniac.

Here and there stood members of the staff. Upon their features Aubrey discerned the placid and philosophic tranquillity which he associated with secondhand booksellers—all save Mifflin.

The floor rocked and sagged, shelves of books were hurled in every direction. Carrying Titania, he had just reached the steps leading to the domestic quarters when they were flung sideways into the corner behind Roger’s desk.

The air was full of flying books.

A row of encyclopedias crashed down upon his shoulders, narrowly missing Titania’s head. The front windows were shivered into flying streamers of broken glass. The table near the door was hurled into the opposite gallery.

“Thanks to that set of Trollope,” said a voice in the remains of the Fiction alcove, “I think I’m all right.

Books make good shock-absorbers.

Is anyone hurt?”

He was wondering how long it might take for a girl to fall in love?

A man⁠—he knew now⁠—could fall in love in five minutes, but how did it work with girls?

He was also thinking what unique Daintybits advertising copy he could build (like all ad men he always spoke of building an ad, never of writing one) out of this affair if he could only use the inside stuff.