Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy | Page 9

them, clasping their hands, thus
stood and gazed his last at America.
"Spoof!" he said.
(We admit that this final panorama, weird in its midnight mystery, and
filling the mind of the reader with a sense of something like awe, is
only appended to Spoof in order to coax him to read our forthcoming
sequel, Spiff!)

II.--The Reading Public. A Book Store Study
"Wish to look about the store? Oh, oh, by all means, sir," he said. Then
as he rubbed his hands together in an urbane fashion he directed a
piercing glance at me through his spectacles.
"You'll find some things that might interest you," he said, "in the back
of the store on the left. We have there a series of reprints--Universal

Knowledge from Aristotle to Arthur Balfour--at seventeen cents. Or
perhaps you might like to look over the Pantheon of Dead Authors at
ten cents. Mr. Sparrow," he called, "just show this gentleman our
classical reprints--the ten-cent series."
With that he waved his hand to an assistant and dismissed me from his
thought.
In other words, he had divined me in a moment. There was no use in
my having bought a sage-green fedora in Broadway, and a sporting tie
done up crosswise with spots as big as nickels. These little adornments
can never hide the soul within. I was a professor, and he knew it, or at
least, as part of his business, he could divine it on the instant.
The sales manager of the biggest book store for 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.