The Haunted Bookshop
Aubrey Gilbert walks into Roger Mifflin's Brooklyn bookshop hoping to land an advertising account. He leaves with neither a contract nor his assumptions about what books mean. Mifflin prescribes novels to customers like medicine, insisting that good literature advertises itself. Aubrey keeps returning, first for Titania Chapman, the shop's new apprentice, then for something he can't name: the strange, sacred atmosphere of a place where books choose their readers. Then the city intrudes. He's attacked on a dark street. A rare volume vanishes from the shelves. Two figures shadow the alley behind Parnassus at Home. Aubrey suspects the charismatic Mifflin of plotting something sinister, but the truth he uncovers is stranger and more tender than kidnapping. Part love letter to bookshop culture, part genuine suspense novel, The Haunted Bookshop invented a genre: the bibliomystery. It endures for anyone who has ever felt that entering the right bookstore felt like coming home.
Editions
X-Ray
“Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.””
— Christopher Morley
“ON THE RETURN OF A BOOKLENT TO A FRIEND I GIVE humble and hearty thanks for the safe return of this book which having endured the perils of my friend's bookcase, and the bookcases of my friend's friends, now returns to me in reasonably good condition. I GIVE humble and hearty thanks that my friend did not see fit to give this book to his infant as a plaything, nor use it as an ash-tray for his burning cigar, nor as a teething-ring for his mastiff. WHEN I lent this book I deemed it as lost: I was resigned to the bitterness of the long parting: I never thought to look upon its pages again. BUT NOW that my book is come back to me, I rejoice and am exceeding glad! Bring hither the fatted morocco and let us rebind the volume and set it on the shelf of honour: for this my book was lent, and is returned again. PRESENTLY, therefore, I may return some of the books that I myself have borrowed.””
— Christopher Morley
“There is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.””
— Christopher Morley
“That's why I call this place the Haunted Bookshop. Haunted by the ghosts of the books I haven't read. Poor uneasy spirits, they walk and walk around me. There's only one way to lay the ghost of a book, and that is to read it.””
— Christopher Morley
“Long ago I fell back on books as the only permanent consolers. They are the one stainless and unimpeachable achievement of the human race. It saddens me to think that I shall have to die with thousands of books unread that would have given me noble and unblemished happiness.””
— Christopher Morley
“Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives. Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world--the brains of men.””
— Christopher Morley
“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!””
— Christopher Morley
“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.””
— Christopher Morley
“I wish there could be an international peaceconference of booksellers, for (you will smile at this) my ownconviction is that the future happiness of the world depends in nosmall measure on them and on the librarians. ””
— Christopher Morley
