THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP(闹鬼的书店)

VIP免费

2024-12-25 0 0 633.8KB 173 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP

THE HAUNTED

BOOKSHOP

BY CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP

Chapter I

The Haunted Bookshop

If you are ever in Brooklyn, that borough of superb sunsets and

magnificent vistas of husband-propelled baby-carriages, it is to be hoped

you may chance upon a quiet by-street where there is a very remarkable

bookshop.

This bookshop, which does business under the unusual name

"Parnassus at Home," is housed in one of the comfortable old brown-stone

dwellings which have been the joy of several generations of plumbers and

cockroaches. The owner of the business has been at pains to remodel the

house to make it a more suitable shrine for his trade, which deals entirely

in second-hand volumes. There is no second-hand bookshop in the world

more worthy of respect.

It was about six o'clock of a cold November evening, with gusts of

rain splattering upon the pavement, when a young man proceeded

uncertainly along Gissing Street, stopping now and then to look at shop

windows as though doubtful of his way. At the warm and shining face of

a French rotisserie he halted to compare the number enamelled on the

transom with a memorandum in his hand. Then he pushed on for a few

minutes, at last reaching the address he sought. Over the entrance his eye

was caught by the sign:

PARNASSUS AT HOME R. AND H. MIFFLINBOOKLOVERS

WELCOME! THIS SHOP IS HAUNTED

He stumbled down the three steps that led into the dwelling of the

muses, lowered his overcoat collar, and looked about.

It was very different from such bookstores as he had been accustomed

to patronize. Two stories of the old house had been thrown into one: the

lower space was divided into little alcoves; above, a gallery ran round the

wall, which carried books to the ceiling. The air was heavy with the

delightful fragrance of mellowed paper and leather surcharged with a

THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP

strong bouquet of tobacco. In front of him he found a large placard in a

frame:

THIS SHOP IS HAUNTED by the ghosts Of 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

THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP

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 cookbook.

"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 cookbook, 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."

THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP

"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."

"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

THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP

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 HAUNTED BOOKSHOP

"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

concocting schemes for cozening his fellows."

The little bookseller's bald pate shone in the light of the bulb hanging

over the wrapping table. His eyes were bright and earnest, his short red

beard bristled like wire. He wore a ragged brown Norfolk jacket from

which two buttons were missing.

A bit of a fanatic himself, thought the customer, but a very entertaining

one. "Well, sir," he said, "I am ever so grateful to you. I'll come again.

Good-night." And he started down the aisle for the door.

As he neared the front of the shop, Mr. Mifflin switched on a cluster of

lights that hung high up, and the young man found himself beside a large

bulletin board covered with clippings, announcements, circulars, and little

notices written on cards in a small neat script. The following caught his

eye:

If your mind needs phosphorus, 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.

THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP

If you need "all manner of Irish," and a relapse into irresponsible

freakishness, try "The Demi-Gods," by James Stephens. It is a better book

than one deserves or expects.

It's a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an

hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way.

One who loves the English tongue can have a lot of fun with a Latin

dictionary.

ROGER MIFFLIN.

Human beings pay very little attention to what is told them unless

they know something about it already. The young man had heard of none

of these books prescribed by the practitioner of bibliotherapy. He was

about to open the door when Mifflin appeared at his side.

"Look here," he said, with a quaint touch of embarrassment. "I was

very much interested by our talk. I'm all alone this evening-- my wife is

away on a holiday. Won't you stay and have supper with me? I was just

looking up some new recipes when you came in."

The other was equally surprised and pleased by this unusual invitation.

"Why--that's very good of you," he said. "Are you sure I won't be

intruding?"

"Not at all!" cried the bookseller. "I detest eating alone: I was hoping

someone would drop in. I always try to have a guest for supper when my

wife is away. I have to stay at home, you see, to keep an eye on the shop.

We have no servant, and I do the cooking myself. It's great fun. Now

you light your pipe and make yourself comfortable for a few minutes

while I get things ready. Suppose you come back to my den."

On a table of books at the front of the shop Mifflin laid a large card

lettered:

PROPRIETOR AT SUPPER IF YOU WANT ANYTHING RING

THIS BELL

Beside the card he placed a large old-fashioned dinner bell, and then

led the way to the rear of the shop.

Behind the little office in which this unusual merchant had been

studying his cookbook a narrow stairway rose on each side, running up to

THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP

the gallery. Behind these stairs a short flight of steps led to the domestic

recesses. The visitor found himself ushered into a small room on the left,

where a grate of coals glowed under a dingy mantelpiece of yellowish

marble. On the mantel stood a row of blackened corn-cob pipes and a

canister of tobacco. Above was a startling canvas in emphatic oils,

representing a large blue wagon drawn by a stout white animal-- evidently

a horse. A background of lush scenery enhanced the forceful technique

of the limner. The walls were stuffed with books. Two shabby,

comfortable chairs were drawn up to the iron fender, and a mustard-

coloured terrier was lying so close to the glow that a smell of singed hair

was sensible.

"There," said the host; "this is my cabinet, my chapel of ease. Take off

your coat and sit down."

"Really," began Gilbert, "I'm afraid this is----"

"Nonsense! Now you sit down and commend your soul to

Providence and the kitchen stove. I'll bustle round and get supper."

Gilbert pulled out his pipe, and with a sense of elation prepared to enjoy

an unusual evening. He was a young man of agreeable parts, amiable

and sensitive. He knew his disadvantages in literary conversation, for he

had gone to an excellent college where glee clubs and theatricals had left

him little time for reading. But still he was a lover of good books, though

he knew them chiefly by hearsay. He was twenty-five years old,

employed as a copywriter by the Grey-Matter Advertising Agency.

The little room in which he found himself was plainly the bookseller's

sanctum, and contained his own private library. Gilbert browsed along the

shelves curiously. The volumes were mostly shabby and bruised; they

had evidently been picked up one by one in the humble mangers of the

second-hand vendor. They all showed marks of use and meditation.

Mr. Gilbert had the earnest mania for self-improvement which has

blighted the lives of so many young men--a passion which, however, is

commendable in those who feel themselves handicapped by a college

career and a jewelled fraternity emblem. It suddenly struck him that it

would be valuable to make a list of some of the titles in Mifflin's

THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP

collection, as a suggestion for his own reading. He took out a

memorandum book and began jotting down the books that intrigued him:

The Works of Francis Thompson (3 vols.) Social History of Smoking:

Apperson The Path to Rome: Hilaire Belloc The Book of Tea: Kakuzo

Happy Thoughts: F. C. Burnand Dr. Johnson's Prayers and Meditations

Margaret Ogilvy: J. M. Barrie Confessions of a Thug: Taylor General

Catalogue of the Oxford University Press The Morning's War: C . E.

Montague The Spirit of Man: edited by Robert Bridges The Romany

Rye: Borrow Poems: Emily Dickinson Poems: George Herbert The

House of Cobwebs: George Gissing

So far had he got, and was beginning to say to himself that in the

interests of Advertising (who is a jealous mistress) he had best call a halt,

when his host entered the room, his small face eager, his eyes blue points

of light.

"Come, Mr. Aubrey Gilbert!" he cried. "The meal is set. You want to

wash your hands? Make haste then, this way: the eggs are hot and

waiting."

The dining room into which the guest was conducted betrayed a

feminine touch not visible in the smoke-dimmed quarters of shop and

cabinet. At the windows were curtains of laughing chintz and pots of pink

geranium. The table, under a drop-light in a flame-coloured silk screen,

was brightly set with silver and blue china. In a cut-glass decanter

sparkled a ruddy brown wine. The edged tool of Advertising felt his

spirits undergo an unmistakable upward pressure.

"Sit down, sir," said Mifflin, lifting the roof of a platter. "These are

eggs Samuel Butler, an invention of my own, the apotheosis of hen fruit."

Gilbert greeted the invention with applause. An Egg Samuel Butler,

for the notebook of housewives, may be summarized as a pyramid, based

upon toast, whereof the chief masonries are a flake of bacon, an egg

poached to firmness, a wreath of mushrooms, a cap-sheaf of red peppers;

the whole dribbled with a warm pink sauce of which the inventor retains

the secret. To this the bookseller chef added fried potatoes from another

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

THEHAUNTEDBOOKSHOP1THEHAUNTEDBOOKSHOPBYCHRISTOPHERMORLEYTHEHAUNTEDBOOKSHOP2ChapterITheHauntedBookshopIfyouareeverinBrooklyn,thatboroughofsuperbsunsetsandmagnificentvistasofhusband-propelledbaby-carriages,itistobehopedyoumaychanceuponaquietby-streetwherethereisaveryremarkablebookshop.Thisbookshop,whi...

展开>> 收起<<

THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP(闹鬼的书店).pdf

共173页,预览35页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP(闹鬼的书店)

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: