The Haunted Bookshop Part 4

MIFFLIN--Not at all. I am simply saying that it is good business to sell only the best.

GLADFIST--Wrong again. You must select your stock according to your customers. Ask Quincy here. Would there be any sense in his loading up his shelves with Maeterlinck and Shaw when the department-store trade wants Eleanor Porter and the Tarzan stuff? Does a country grocer carry the same cigars that are listed on the wine card of a Fifth Avenue hotel? Of course not. He gets in the cigars that his trade enjoys and is accustomed to. Bookselling must obey the ordinary rules of commerce.

MIFFLIN--A fig for the ordinary rules of commerce! I came over here to Gissing Street to get away from them. My mind would blow out its fuses if I had to abide by the dirty little considerations of supply and demand. As far as I am concerned, supply CREATES demand.

GLADFIST--Still, old chap, you have to abide by the dirty little consideration of earning a living, unless someone has endowed you?

BENSON--Of course my line of business isn't strictly the same as you fellows'. But a thought that has often occurred to me in selling rare editions may interest you. The customer's willingness to part with his money is usually in inverse ratio to the permanent benefit he expects to derive from what he purchases.

MEREDITH--Sounds a bit like John Stuart Mill.

BENSON--Even so, it may be true. Folks will pay a darned sight more to be amused than they will to be exalted. Look at the way a man sh.e.l.ls out five bones for a couple of theatre seats, or spends a couple of dollars a week on cigars without thinking of it. Yet two dollars or five dollars for a book costs him positive anguish. The mistake you fellows in the retail trade have made is in trying to persuade your customers that books are necessities. Tell them they're luxuries.

That'll get them! People have to work so hard in this life they're shy of necessities. A man will go on wearing a suit until it's threadbare, much sooner than smoke a threadbare cigar.

GLADFIST--Not a bad thought. You know, Mifflin here calls me a material-minded cynic, but by thunder, I think I'm more idealistic than he is. I'm no propagandist incessantly trying to cajole poor innocent customers into buying the kind of book _I_ think they ought to buy.

When I see the helpless pathos of most of them, who drift into a bookstore without the slightest idea of what they want or what is worth reading, I would disdain to take advantage of their frailty. They are absolutely at the mercy of the salesman. They will buy whatever he tells them to. Now the honourable man, the high-minded man (by which I mean myself) is too proud to ram some s.h.i.+mmering stuff at them just because he thinks they ought to read it. Let the b.o.o.bs blunder around and grab what they can. Let natural selection operate. I think it is fascinating to watch them, to see their helpless groping, and to study the weird ways in which they make their choice. Usually they will buy a book either because they think the jacket is attractive, or because it costs a dollar and a quarter instead of a dollar and a half, or because they say they saw a review of it. The "review" usually turns out to be an ad. I don't think one book-buyer in a thousand knows the difference.

MIFFLIN--Your doctrine is pitiless, base, and false! What would you think of a physician who saw men suffering from a curable disease and did nothing to alleviate their sufferings?

GLADFIST--Their sufferings (as you call them) are nothing to what mine would be if I stocked up with a lot of books that no one but highbrows would buy. What would you think of a base public that would go past my shop day after day and let the high-minded occupant die of starvation?

MIFFLIN--Your ailment, Jerry, is that you conceive yourself as merely a tradesman. What I'm telling you is that the bookseller is a public servant. He ought to be pensioned by the state. The honour of his profession should compel him to do all he can to spread the distribution of good stuff.

QUINCY--I think you forget how much we who deal chiefly in new books are at the mercy of the publishers. We have to stock the new stuff, a large proportion of which is always punk. Why it is punk, goodness knows, because most of the b.u.m books don't sell.

MIFFLIN--Ah, that is a mystery indeed! But I can give you a fair reason. First, because there isn't enough good stuff to go round.

Second, because of the ignorance of the publishers, many of whom honestly don't know a good book when they see it. It is a matter of sheer heedlessness in the selection of what they intend to publish. A big drug factory or a manufacturer of a well-known jam spends vast sums of money on chemically a.s.saying and a.n.a.lyzing the ingredients that are to go into his medicines or in gathering and selecting the fruit that is to be stewed into jam. And yet they tell me that the most important department of a publis.h.i.+ng business, which is the gathering and sampling of ma.n.u.scripts, is the least considered and the least remunerated. I knew a reader for one publis.h.i.+ng house: he was a babe recently out of college who didn't know a book from a frat pin. If a jam factory employs a trained chemist, why isn't it worth a publisher's while to employ an expert book a.n.a.lyzer? There are some of them. Look at the fellow who runs the Pacific Monthly's book business for example!

He knows a thing or two.

CHAPMAN--I think perhaps you exaggerate the value of those trained experts. They are likely to be fourflushers. We had one once at our factory, and as far as I could make out he never thought we were doing good business except when we were losing money.

MIFFLIN--As far as I have been able to observe, making money is the easiest thing in the world. All you have to do is to turn out an honest product, something that the public needs. Then you have to let them know that you have it, and teach them that they need it. They will batter down your front door in their eagerness to get it. But if you begin to hand them gold bricks, if you begin to sell them books built like an apartment house, all marble front and all brick behind, you're cutting your own throat, or rather cutting your own pocket, which is the same thing.

MEREDITH--I think Mifflin's right. You know the kind of place our shop is: a regular Fifth Avenue store, all plate gla.s.s front and marble columns glowing in the indirect lighting like a birchwood at full moon.

We sell hundreds of dollars' worth of bunk.u.m every day because people ask for it; but I tell you we do it with reluctance. It's rather the custom in our shop to scoff at the book-buying public and call them b.o.o.bs, but they really want good books--the poor souls don't know how to get them. Still, Jerry has a certain grain of truth to his credit.

I get ten times more satisfaction in selling a copy of Newton's The Amenities of Book-Collecting than I do in selling a copy of--well, Tarzan; but it's poor business to impose your own private tastes on your customers. All you can do is to hint them along tactfully, when you get a chance, toward the stuff that counts.

QUINCY--You remind me of something that happened in our book department the other day. A flapper came in and said she had forgotten the name of the book she wanted, but it was something about a young man who had been brought up by the monks. I was stumped. I tried her with The Cloister and the Hearth and Monastery Bells and Legends of the Monastic Orders and so on, but her face was blank. Then one of the salesgirls overheard us talking, and she guessed it right off the bat. Of course it was Tarzan.

MIFFLIN--You poor simp, there was your chance to introduce her to Mowgli and the bandar-log.

QUINCY--True--I didn't think of it.

MIFFLIN--I'd like to get you fellows' ideas about advertising. There was a young chap in here the other day from an advertising agency, trying to get me to put some copy in the papers. Have you found that it pays?

FRUEHLING--It always pays--somebody. The only question is, does it pay the man who pays for the ad?

MEREDITH--What do you mean?

FRUEHLING--Did you ever consider the problem of what I call tangential advertising? By that I mean advertising that benefits your rival rather than yourself? Take an example. On Sixth Avenue there is a lovely delicatessen shop, but rather expensive. Every conceivable kind of sweetmeat and relish is displayed in the brightly lit window. When you look at that window it simply makes your mouth water. You decide to have something to eat. But do you get it there? Not much! You go a little farther down the street and get it at the Automat or the Crystal Lunch. The delicatessen fellow pays the overhead expense of that beautiful food exhibit, and the other man gets the benefit of it.

It's the same way in my business. I'm in a factory district, where people can't afford to have any but the best books. (Meredith will bear me out in saying that only the wealthy can afford the poor ones.) They read the book ads in the papers and magazines, the ads of Meredith's shop and others, and then they come to me to buy them. I believe in advertising, but I believe in letting someone else pay for it.

MIFFLIN--I guess perhaps I can afford to go on riding on Meredith's ads. I hadn't thought of that. But I think I shall put a little notice in one of the papers some day, just a little card saying

PARNa.s.sUS AT HOME GOOD BOOKS BOUGHT AND SOLD THIS SHOP IS HAUNTED

It will be fun to see what come-back I get.

QUINCY--The book section of a department store doesn't get much chance to enjoy that tangential advertising, as Fruehling calls it. Why, when our interior decorating shark puts a few volumes of a pirated Kipling bound in crushed oilcloth or a copy of "Knock-kneed Stories," into the window to show off a Louis XVIII boudoir suite, display s.p.a.ce is charged up against my department! Last summer he asked me for "something by that Ring fellow, I forget the name," to put a punchy finish on a layout of porch furniture. I thought perhaps he meant Wagner's Nibelungen operas, and began to dig them out. Then I found he meant Ring Lardner.

GLADFIST--There you are. I keep telling you bookselling is an impossible job for a man who loves literature. When did a bookseller ever make any real contribution to the world's happiness?

MIFFLIN--Dr. Johnson's father was a bookseller.

GLADFIST--Yes, and couldn't afford to pay for Sam's education.

FRUEHLING--There's another kind of tangential advertising that interests me. Take, for instance, a Coles Phillips painting for some brand of silk stockings. Of course the high lights of the picture are cunningly focussed on the stockings of the eminently beautiful lady; but there is always something else in the picture--an automobile or a country house or a Morris chair or a parasol--which makes it just as effective an ad for those goods as it is for the stockings. Every now and then Phillips sticks a book into his paintings, and I expect the Fifth Avenue book trade benefits by it. A book that fits the mind as well as a silk stocking does the ankle will be sure to sell.

MIFFLIN--You are all cra.s.s materialists. I tell you, books are the depositories of the human spirit, which is the only thing in this world that endures. What was it Shakespeare said--

Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme--

By the bones of the Hohenzollerns, he was right! And wait a minute!

There's something in Carlyle's Cromwell that comes back to me.

He ran excitedly out of the room, and the members of the Corn Cob fraternity grinned at each other. Gladfist cleaned his pipe and poured out some more cider. "He's off on his hobby," he chuckled. "I love baiting him."

"Speaking of Carlyle's Cromwell," said Fruehling, "that's a book I don't often hear asked for. But a fellow came in the other day hunting for a copy, and to my chagrin I didn't have one. I rather pride myself on keeping that sort of thing in stock. So I called up Brentano's to see if I could pick one up, and they told me they had just sold the only copy they had. Somebody must have been boosting Thomas! Maybe he's quoted in Tarzan, or somebody has bought up the film rights."

Mifflin came in, looking rather annoyed.

"Here's an odd thing," he said. "I know d.a.m.n well that copy of Cromwell was on the shelf because I saw it there last night. It's not there now."

"That's nothing," said Quincy. "You know how people come into a second-hand store, see a book they take a fancy to but don't feel like buying just then, and tuck it away out of sight or on some other shelf where they think no one else will spot it, but they'll be able to find it when they can afford it. Probably someone's done that with your Cromwell."

"Maybe, but I doubt it," said Mifflin. "Mrs. Mifflin says she didn't sell it this evening. I woke her up to ask her. She was dozing over her knitting at the desk. I guess she's tired after her trip."

"I'm sorry to miss the Carlyle quotation," said Benson. "What was the gist?"

"I think I've got it jotted down in a notebook," said Roger, hunting along a shelf. "Yes, here it is." He read aloud:

"The works of a man, bury them under what guano-mountains and obscene owl-droppings you will, do not perish, cannot perish. What of Heroism, what of Eternal Light was in a Man and his Life, is with very great exactness added to the Eternities, remains forever a new divine portion of the Sum of Things.