The Haunted Bookshop | Page 2

all great literature, in
hosts;
We sell no fakes or trashes. Lovers of books are welcome here, No
clerks will babble in your ear,
Please smoke--but don't drop ashes! ---- Browse as long as you like.
Prices of all books plainly marked. If you want to ask questions, you'll
find the proprietor where the tobacco smoke is thickest. We pay cash
for books. We have what you want, though you may not know you
want it.
Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing.
Let us prescribe for you.
By R. & H. MIFFLIN, Proprs.
The shop had a warm and comfortable obscurity, a kind of drowsy dusk,
stabbed here and there by bright cones of yellow light from
green-shaded electrics. There was an all-pervasive drift of tobacco
smoke, which eddied and fumed under the glass lamp shades. Passing
down a narrow aisle between the alcoves the visitor noticed that some
of the compartments were wholly in darkness; in others where lamps
were glowing he could see a table and chairs. In one corner, under a
sign lettered ESSAYS, an elderly gentleman was reading, with a face of

fanatical ecstasy illumined by the sharp glare of electricity; but there
was no wreath of smoke about him so the newcomer concluded he was
not the proprietor.
As the young man approached the back of the shop the general effect
became more and more fantastic. On some skylight far overhead he
could hear the rain drumming; but otherwise the place was completely
silent, peopled only (so it seemed) by the gurgitating whorls of smoke
and the bright profile of the essay reader. It seemed like a secret fane,
some shrine of curious rites, and the young man's throat was tightened
by a stricture which was half agitation and half tobacco. Towering
above him into the gloom were shelves and shelves of books, darkling
toward the roof. He saw a table with a cylinder of brown paper and
twine, evidently where purchases might be wrapped; but there was no
sign of an attendant.
"This place may indeed be haunted," he thought, "perhaps by the
delighted soul of Sir Walter Raleigh, patron of the weed, but seemingly
not by the proprietors."
His eyes, searching the blue and vaporous vistas of the shop, were
caught by a circle of brightness that shone with a curious egg-like lustre.
It was round and white, gleaming in the sheen of a hanging light, a
bright island in a surf of tobacco smoke. He came more close, and
found it was a bald head.
This head (he then saw) surmounted a small, sharp-eyed man who sat
tilted back in a swivel chair, in a corner which seemed the nerve centre
of the establishment. The large pigeon-holed desk in front of him was
piled high with volumes of all sorts, with tins of tobacco and
newspaper clippings and letters. An antiquated typewriter, looking
something like a harpsichord, was half-buried in sheets of manuscript.
The little bald-headed man was smoking a corn-cob pipe and reading a
cook-book.
"I beg your pardon," said the caller, pleasantly; "is this the proprietor?"
Mr. Roger Mifflin, the proprietor of "Parnassus at Home," looked up,
and the visitor saw that he had keen blue eyes, a short red beard, and a
convincing air of competent originality.
"It is," said Mr. Mifflin. "Anything I can do for you?"
"My name is Aubrey Gilbert," said the young man. "I am representing
the Grey-Matter Advertising Agency. I want to discuss with you the

advisability of your letting us handle your advertising account, prepare
snappy copy for you, and place it in large circulation mediums. Now
the war's over, you ought to prepare some constructive campaign for
bigger business."
The bookseller's face beamed. He put down his cook-book, blew an
expanding gust of smoke, and looked up brightly.
"My dear chap," he said, "I don't do any advertising."
"Impossible!" cried the other, aghast as at some gratuitous indecency.
"Not in the sense you mean. Such advertising as benefits me most is
done for me by the snappiest copywriters in the business."
"I suppose you refer to Whitewash and Gilt?" said Mr. Gilbert
wistfully.
"Not at all. The people who are doing my advertising are Stevenson,
Browning, Conrad and Company."
"Dear me," said the Grey-Matter solicitor. "I don't know that agency at
all. Still, I doubt if their copy has more pep than ours."
"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."
"But that word-of-mouth advertising is exploded," said Gilbert. "You
can't get Distribution that way. You've got to keep your trademark
before the public."