The Haunted Bookshop | Page 3

"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! People don't go
to a bookseller until some serious mental accident or disease makes
them aware of their danger. Then they come here. For me to advertise
would be about as useful as telling people who feel perfectly well that
they ought to go to the doctor. Do you know why people are reading
more books now than ever before? Because the terrific catastrophe of
the war has made them realize that their minds are ill. The world was
suffering from all sorts of mental fevers and aches and disorders, and

never knew it. Now our mental pangs are only too manifest. We are all
reading, hungrily, hastily, trying to find out--after the trouble is
over--what was the matter with our minds."
The little bookseller was standing up now, and his visitor watched him
with mingled amusement and alarm.
"You know," said Mifflin, "I am interested that you should have
thought it worth while to come in here. It reinforces my conviction of
the amazing future ahead of the book business. But I tell you that future
lies not merely in systematizing it as a trade. It lies in dignifying it as a
profession. It is small use to jeer at the public for craving shoddy books,
quack books, untrue books. 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."
"Why wouldn't advertising be the way to let them know?" asked the
young man, rather acutely.
"My dear chap, I understand the value of advertising. 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 post mortem 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.
"I will tell you another reason why I don't advertise," he continued. "In
these days when everyone keeps his trademark before the public, as
you call it, not to advertise is the most original and startling thing one
can do to attract attention. It was the fact that I do NOT advertise that
drew you here. And everyone who comes here thinks he has discovered
the place himself. He goes and tells his friends about the book asylum
run by a crank and a lunatic, and they come here in turn to see what it is

like."
"I should like to come here again myself and browse about," said the
advertising agent. "I should like to have you prescribe for me."
"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."
"You are open in the evenings?"
"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