Book-Destiny
By: James Mustich
Tags: Literature, Culture, Reading, Books

2: The Haunted Bookshop

One of my favorite pastimes — it is, in fact, a sort of solitaire, in which books assume the place of playing cards, with letters, stories, poems, and memoirs standing in for hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades — is the maintenance of an imaginary bookcase. This small stack of shelves and its carefully chosen contents belong to an equally imaginary, yet nonetheless gracious guest bedroom that lies somewhere beneath (in space) and beyond (in time) the parking lot for toys that currently qualifies as our home’s hosting pad. No matter, the books in mind are real enough to me, and I take endless pains to balance their qualities so that our phantom visitors will be treated to an inviting menu of the pleasures to be taken between covers. Large questions of reading matter and moment are entertained as I select and arrange these bedside companions: do I opt for diverting tales or absorbing tomes? For prose that teases or that tranquilizes? Is it best that essays plumb pools of meditation, or merely skim their surface with wit and clever commentary? Are dreams deepened by weighty thoughts or leavened by light reading? Should the words I wish upon my guests induce sleep or encourage the dangerous intrigue of insomnia? It’s a game that gives a diverting outward cast to a lifetime’s inward occupation, and one I suspect that’s played, in some form or another, by anyone who trades in books.

It is certainly played in a spirited fashion by Roger Mifflin in Chapter III of The Haunted Bookshop, as he prepares a spare bedroom for his new shop assistant, Miss Titania Chapman, in the “comfortable old brown-stone” dwelling he shares with his wife, the former Helen McGill (with whom readers of Morley’s first Mifflin novel, Parnassus on Wheels, are already well-acquainted). In addition to living quarters, of course, the Mifflins’ Brooklyn brownstone houses — in “warm and comfortable obscurity, a kind of drowsy dusk” — Parnassus at Home, the stationary incarnation of the itinerant literary tabernacle that gave the earlier book its name. Having hung some pictures on the walls of his acolyte’s new quarters, Mifflin “bethought himself of the books that should stand on the bedside shelf,” devoting the “delighted hours of the morning” to consideration of what to put there. What follows is as careful a disquisition on the subject of the “proper books for a guest-room” — “a question that admits of the utmost nicety of discussion” — as one is ever likely to come across, one that not only generates a list of alluring titles that will send you scurrying to your own favorite sources of secondhand books, but also speaks volumes about the bookseller’s faith in the life-enhancing force these titles represent.

Such faith, after all, is the animating spirit of The Haunted Bookshop, despite the very real diversion and suspense delivered by the novel’s capering plot, in which an ambitious (albeit unlettered) advertising man, Mr. Aubrey Gilbert, woos a comely young heiress (Miss Chapman) by doggedly uncovering the designs of nefarious foreign agents operating just down the block from Mifflin’s den of serenity.** While Gilbert is busy deciphering the perilous puzzle he has stumbled upon, whose pieces include a local druggist, hotel chefs, and, largest and most mysterious of all, a vanishing copy of Thomas Carlyle’s edition of Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, Mifflin goes about his bookish business, celebrating, with his “convincing air of competent originality,” the magic and motive power of books. His enthusiasm is of course endorsed and abetted by Morley himself, who allows his erudite protagonist to offer diagnoses (“I can see just by looking at you that your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully unaware of it!”) and prescriptions (“If your mind needs phosphorous, try Trivia by Logan Pearsall Smith. If your mind needs a whiff of strong air, blue and cleansing, from hilltops and primrose valleys, try The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies. If your mind needs a tonic of iron and wine, and a thorough rough-and-tumbling, try Samuel Butler’s Notebooks or The Man Who Was Thursday, by Chesterton”) that will cheer the heart of any book-besotted reader. To say nothing of the happy lessons Mifflin imparts to Titania as he extemporizes an introductory course in the art of bookselling, or the trade-based disputations of the convention of his colleagues — “The Corn Cob Club” — assembled in Chapter II (the latter half of which, Morley coyly advises us, “may be omitted by all readers who are not booksellers”).

In short, for all the entertainment one can take in the pages of The Haunted Bookshop and its predecessor (and the pleasures they proffer are considerable), the enduring delights of both novels belong to their unabashed and merry exaltation of books. The romance of the bookshop (with the attendant charms of dust and discovery, study and serendipity, the errors of pursuit and the truths of apprehension — “We have what you want, though you may not know you want it”) is nowhere better caught than in the environs of Roger Mifflin’s humble Parnassus, and most often on his own tongue. “To spread good books about,” he tells Titania, “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?” From where I sit, I can only hope — no, trust — that it is.

That books can influence, amuse, enhance, intensify, heal, even determine our lives is the ardent message wrapped within the warm folds of this cozy tale. Like ghosts, books haunt us. Which is why the ones placed on a bedside shelf must be chosen carefully; in the rooms within my ken, it goes without saying, such a fateful selection is bound to include both The Haunted Bookshop and Parnassus on Wheels.