Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy | Page 9

ten blocks cannot be deceived in a customer. And he knew, of course, that, as a professor, I was no good. I had come to the store, as all professors go to book stores, just as a wasp comes to an open jar of marmalade. He knew that I would hang around for two hours, get in everybody's way, and finally buy a cheap reprint of the Dialogues of Plato, or the Prose Works of John Milton, or Locke on the Human Understanding, or some trash of that sort.
As for real taste in literature--the ability to appreciate at its worth a dollar-fifty novel of last month, in a spring jacket with a tango frontispiece--I hadn't got it and he knew it.
He despised me, of course. But it is a maxim of the book business that a professor standing up in a corner buried in a book looks well in a store. The real customers like it.
So it was that even so up-to-date a manager as Mr. Sellyer tolerated my presence in a back corner of his store: and so it was that I had an opportunity of noting something of his methods with his real customers--methods so successful, I may say, that he is rightly looked upon by all the publishing business as one of the mainstays of literature in America.
I had no intention of standing in the place and listening as a spy. In fact, to tell the truth, I had become immediately interested in a new translation of the Moral Discourses of Epictetus. The book was very neatly printed, quite well bound and was offered at eighteen cents; so that for the moment I was strongly tempted to buy it, though it seemed best to take a dip into it first.
I had hardly read more than the first three chapters when my attention was diverted by a conversation going on in the front of the store.
"You're quite sure it's his LATEST?" a fashionably dressed lady was saying to Mr. Sellyer.
"Oh, yes, Mrs. Rasselyer," answered the manager. "I assure you this is his very latest. In fact, they only came in yesterday."
As he spoke, he indicated with his hand a huge pile of books, gayly jacketed in white and blue. I could make out the title in big gilt lettering--GOLDEN DREAMS.
"Oh, yes," repeated Mr. Sellyer. "This is Mr. Slush's latest book. It's having a wonderful sale."
"That's all right, then," said the lady. "You see, one sometimes gets taken in so: I came in here last week and took two that seemed very nice, and I never noticed till I got home that they were both old books, published, I think, six months ago."
"Oh, dear me, Mrs. Rasselyer," said the manager in an apologetic tone, "I'm extremely sorry. Pray let us send for them and exchange them for you."
"Oh, it does not matter," said the lady; "of course I didn't read them. I gave them to my maid. She probably wouldn't know the difference, anyway."
"I suppose not," said Mr. Sellyer, with a condescending smile. "But of course, madam," he went on, falling into the easy chat of the fashionable bookman, "such mistakes are bound to happen sometimes. We had a very painful case only yesterday. One of our oldest customers came in in a great hurry to buy books to take on the steamer, and before we realised what he had done--selecting the books I suppose merely by the titles, as some gentlemen are apt to do--he had taken two of last year's books. We wired at once to the steamer, but I'm afraid it's too late."
"But now, this book," said the lady, idly turning over the leaves, "is it good? What is it about?"
"It's an extremely POWERFUL thing," said Mr. Sellyer, "in fact, MASTERLY. The critics are saying that it's perhaps THE most powerful book of the season. It has a--" and here Mr. Sellyer paused, and somehow his manner reminded me of my own when I am explaining to a university class something that I don't know myself--"It has a--a--POWER, so to speak--a very exceptional power; in fact, one may say without exaggeration it is the most POWERFUL book of the month. Indeed," he added, getting on to easier ground, "it's having a perfectly wonderful sale."
"You seem to have a great many of them," said the lady.
"Oh, we have to," answered the manager. "There's a regular rush on the book. Indeed, you know it's a book that is bound to make a sensation. In fact, in certain quarters, they are saying that it's a book that ought not to--" And here Mr. Sellyer's voice became so low and ingratiating that I couldn't hear the rest of the sentence.
"Oh, really!" said Mrs. Rasselyer. "Well, I think I'll take it then. One ought to see what these talked-of things are