Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop

Book number 59 of 2024

The Haunted Bookshop is the sequel to Parnassus On Wheels, which I reviewed here. That book was the quirky and fun tale of a middle-aged farmwoman, Helen McGill, who left her farm and brother to sell books to other rural folk from a mobile, horse-drawn bookstore. The theme of the novel was that anyone can appreciate a good book, given the opportunity. Roger Mifflin was the eccentric little man who sold her the bookstore, named Parnassus.

Roger and Helen return in The Haunted Bookshop, happily married and running a bookshop called Parnassus at Home on Gissing Street, in Brooklyn. There is sign explaining why it’s haunted:

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!

Christopher Morley. The Haunted Bookshop (Kindle Locations 69-73). Standard Ebooks. Kindle Edition.

It is filled to the ceiling with used books, and Roger hosts meetings of fellow booksellers from all over New York City. One evening, a young ad salesman, Aubrey Gilbert, stops in to see if Roger would be interested in running ads for his store. Roger declines, but invites him to stay for dinner, since Helen is staying with family in Boston. They hit it off, and Aubrey mentions that one of his accounts is for Chapman’s Daintybits Prunes. George Chapman is also a book lover, who has asked Roger to give his daughter, Titania, a job in his bookshop so she can learn what real life is like. She has been to finishing school, so as a result knows nothing!

While Roger and Aubrey are having a leisurely meal, a customer comes in, asking for a copy of Carlyle’s Cromwell. Roger is sure he has a copy, but when he goes to where it should be, it isn’t there. A little later, while he is dusting the shelves, there is the copy of Cromwell, right where it should be! Meanwhile, Helen returns from Boston and Titania arrives. The Mifflins have fixed up the spare room for her, and she is delighted to begin a career “in literature”. Roger tells Helen about the case of the Cromwell, and when he goes to show her, it’s gone again! Titania picks up the New York Times, and in the Lost and Found section there is this ad:

Lost – Copy of Thomas Carlyle’s Oliver Cromwell between Gissing Street, Brooklyn, and the Octagon Hotel. If found before midnight, Tuesday, Dec. 3, return to assistant chef, Octagon Hotel.

That evening, Aubrey stops by to tell Roger about the ad and the fact that he dined at the Octagon with George Chapman. He also mentions that when he was in the elevator, a chef got in, carrying a copy of Cromwell! Aubrey also meets the beautiful Titania, with predictable results.

Thus begins an entertaining mystery involving a strange copy of Carlyle’s Cromwell, messages sent via Lost and Found notices, and other odd occurrences. Aubrey finds himself a target of a dastardly gang of German spies hellbent on blowing up President Woodrow Wilson as he travels to Europe to negotiate the peace. Meanwhile, Titania enjoys working at the Haunted Bookshop enormously, even if she is blissfully unaware of the danger she is in.

While the plot of The Haunted Bookshop is an improvement over that of Parnassus On Wheels, in The Haunted Bookshop Morley has an unfortunate tendency to use characters to expound his personal opinions to the reader. The Haunted Bookshop was published in 1919, immediately after the World War I Armistice, and Morley certainly had strong feelings about how that conflict occurred and how the peace should be concluded. That’s understandable, but to have Roger Mifflin pontificate for paragraph after paragraph gets tiresome. Morley even devotes an entire chapter to a letter Roger writes in which he expresses his admiration for books, booksellers, and President Wilson, and the role they will play in the new world that is certain to arise from the ashes of The Great War. I found myself wanting Morley to get back to the story at hand, because it was a pretty good one.

On balance, The Haunted Bookshop isn’t a profound work by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a fairly fun adventure tale. It’s too bad that whenever things start to get interesting, Morley chooses to veer off into opinionating. Parnassus On Wheels is the better novel, and you won’t be missing much if you skip this one.

Christopher Morley’s Parnassus On Wheels

Book number 58 of 2024

I was poking around the Standard Ebooks website looking for old mystery novels, and Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop came up. I had never heard of him, but I learned that The Haunted Bookshop  was actually the sequel to Parnassus On Wheels, so I decided to read that one first. I’m glad I did! Parnassus On Wheels (1917) is the comic tale of thirty-nine-year-old Helen McGill who decides to leave her and her brother’s farm in New England and become an itinerant bookseller.

Helen’s brother, Andrew, writes a bestselling book about the benefits of the simple country life, and he becomes so in-demand that Helen ends up doing most of the work on the farm. As Helen puts it:

But Andrew got to be less and less of a farmer and more and more of a literary man. He bought a typewriter. He would hang over the pigpen noting down adjectives for the sunset instead of mending the weathervane on the barn which took a slew so that the north wind came from the southwest. He hardly ever looked at the Sears Roebuck catalogues any more, and after Mr.   Decameron came to visit us and suggested that Andrew write a book of country poems, the man became simply unbearable.

Christopher Morley. Parnassus on Wheels (Kindle Locations 130-133). Standard Ebooks. Kindle Edition.

She has about reached the end of her patience when an eccentric little man pulls up to their farmhouse in a horse-driven van that is a combination mobile home/bookstore. Roger Mifflin has an almost religious zeal when it comes to providing good reads to the families who live in rural America, but he is ready to retire. He had planned on offering his operation to Andrew for $400, but Helen jumps at the opportunity to go on an adventure, and buys him out herself.

So Helen and Mifflin take to the road as he shows her the ropes of how to sell good books to farm families. He is very careful about how he goes about his work:

“I don’t pay much over fifty cents for books as a rule, because country folks are shy of paying much for them. They’ll pay a lot for a separator or a buggy top, but they’ve never been taught to worry about literature! But it’s surprising how excited they get about books if you sell ’em the right kind. Over beyond Port Vigor there’s a farmer who’s waiting for me to go back— I’ve been there three or four times— and he’ll buy about five dollars’ worth if I know him. First time I went there I sold him Treasure Island, and he’s talking about it yet. I sold him Robinson Crusoe, and Little Women for his daughter, and Huck Finn, and Grubb’s book about The Potato. Last time I was there he wanted some Shakespeare, but I wouldn’t give it to him. I didn’t think he was up to it yet.”

Christopher Morley. Parnassus on Wheels (Kindle Locations 394-401). Standard Ebooks. Kindle Edition.

Later on, Mifflin explains why he has spent so much time selling books to country folk:

“What I say is, who has ever gone out into high roads and hedges to bring literature home to the plain man? To bring it home to his business and bosom, as somebody says? The farther into the country you go, the fewer and worse books you find. I’ve spent several years joggling around with this citadel of crime, and by the bones of Ben Ezra I don’t think I ever found a really good book (except the Bible) at a farmhouse yet, unless I put it there myself. The mandarins of culture— what do they do to teach the common folk to read? It’s no good writing down lists of books for farmers and compiling five-foot shelves; you’ve got to go out and visit the people yourself— take the books to them, talk to the teachers and bully the editors of country newspapers and farm magazines and tell the children stories— and then little by little you begin to get good books circulating in the veins of the nation. It’s a great work, mind you! It’s like carrying the Holy Grail to some of these way-back farmhouses. And I wish there were a thousand Parnassuses instead of this one.”

Christopher Morley. Parnassus on Wheels (Kindle Locations 779-787). Standard Ebooks. Kindle Edition.

In other words, he is a kind of Johnny Appleseed of books – spreading good literature wherever it will take root. Half the fun of reading Parnassus On Wheels is catching all the literary references Helen and Mifflin drop. One morning, Helen describes herself “as chipper as any Robert W. Chambers heroine.’ One of Mifflin’s colorful oaths is, “by the bones of George Eliot”. Harold Bell Wright earns a mention, and Henry James comes in for some criticism:

A good book ought to have something simple about it. And, like Eve, it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it. A story that’s all forehead doesn’t amount to much. Anyway, it’ll never get over at a Dorcas meeting. That was the trouble with Henry James. Andrew talked so much about him that I took one of his books to read aloud at our sewing circle over at Redfield. Well, after one try we had to fall back on Pollyanna.

Christopher Morley. Parnassus on Wheels (Kindle Locations 1377-1381). Standard Ebooks. Kindle Edition.

Even though Mifflin intends to return to Brooklyn to write the book he’s been planning, he keeps popping up at opportune times. They have a run-in with some unscrupulous hobos, Helen’s brother Andrew persists in thinking Mifflin is a conman and his sister has gone crazy, and Mifflin gets arrested. It’s all a lot of fun, and this gentle adventure story is a nice window into rural American life at the turn of the twentieth century.

Back then, people were quite hospitable: every time Helen stops at a farmhouse with her bookstore on wheels, she is welcomed by the family, given a meal, and invited to spend the night. Life moved at a much slower pace; people took the time to talk and get to know each other. The only distraction was the telephone – no radio, television, or internet, of course. The only entertainment available was provided by families themselves – reading a book aloud, playing some music, etc. In our age of instant, near-infinite choices of music and video, we’ve lost some simpler pleasures. 

I enjoyed Parnassus On Wheels so much that I plan to dive straight into its sequel, The Haunted Bookshop. That will be the subject of my next post!