Did you ever notice how books track you down and hunt you out? They follow you like the hound in Francis Thompson's poem. They know their quarry!... Words can't describe the cunning of some books. You'll think you've shaken them off your trail, and then one day some innocent-looking customer will pop in and begin to talk, and you'll know he's an unconscious agent of book-destiny.
What do you get when you cross Morley's novels The Haunted Bookshop with Parnassus on Wheels? I thought of this when I learned about The Grim Reader Bookshop, a mobile bookstore located in the back of a decommissioned 2004 Cadillac DeVille hearse. It haunts the Atlanta, Ga., area, "stopping at cool events, coffee shops, markets, and more," Secret Atlanta reported.
"Remember the magic of the school book fair?" The Grim Reader asks on its website. "The squeaky tables, the smell of new paperbacks, the one kid who always bought every eraser shaped like food? The Grim Reader Bookshop is that feeling, resurrected, with more ghosts. We're a mobile bookshop in a hearse, serving up horror, dark fantasy, and strange little stories for the grown-up weirdos in (and around) Atlanta who never stopped chasing that book fair buzz. Come find something strange and spellbinding."
So why shouldn't my mind drift, especially this time of year, to Mr. Morley, one of my bookselling heroes? Halloween is, after all, a bookseller's dream. What holiday is more appropriate for a national celebration honoring (and capitalizing on) the literary dead, especially those whose undead books still pay a significant portion of our wages? Publishing houses may not be haunted houses--as a rule--but storytelling has a distinguished spectral pedigree.
I've long been haunted by Morley and his fictional bookshops. In The Haunted Bookshop ("haunted by the ghosts of great literature," as he describes it), we are informed that in Brooklyn, "that borough of superb sunsets and magnificent vistas of husband-propelled baby-carriages," there is "a very remarkable bookshop" doing business under the unusual name of Parnassus at Home. It "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."
Over the entrance of the bookshop is this sign:
PARNASSUS AT HOME
R. AND H. MIFFLIN
BOOKLOVERS WELCOME!
THIS SHOP IS HAUNTED
Venturing inside, one encounters a "large placard in a frame" that reads:
This shop is haunted by the ghosts
Of all great literature, in hosts
Aren't we all haunted by the books we've read and the authors who've possessed us. We're mediums by avocation and, if lucky, vocation, channeling the eloquently dead. Then there are those other book ghosts, the unread ones who whisper from the shelves: "Read us... Read us... Why won't you read us?" A chill runs up spines of various kinds.
"That's why I call this place the Haunted Bookshop. Haunted by the ghosts of the books I haven't read," the proprietor, Roger Mifflin, says. "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."
In 1959, the New York Times featured an obituary for Max M. Maisel, owner of a bookshop on the lower East Side for 60 years before his retirement. He opened his shop in 1892 at 424 Grand Street, on the corner of Attorney St. "It became the meeting place of intellectuals around the time of World War I," the obit noted, adding that "Christopher Morley used it as the setting for his novel The Haunted Bookshop, published in 1919." The site seems to be an empty lot now, surrounded by apartment buildings. Could still be haunted, though. Probably is.
 |
|
| Christopher Morley | |
Morley died in 1957. In his obit, the Times wrote: "Surrounded by dozens of the newest books, which had spilled from several bookcases, Mr. Morley wrote literally to the accompaniment of the running sands of time. Prominent on the big dining table he used as a work table stood an hour glass that ran sixty-two and a half minutes to the hour. Mr. Morley dictated while the sand ran through in long measurement, a system, he said, that kept him to his writing chores for the full time he had previously allotted." He wrote more than 50 novels, essay collections, and volumes of poetry. Writers, get yourself an hour glass.
The obit also noted he "boasted that his best-loved private associations were with 'people devoid of conventional culture, such as booksellers, shipmasters, traveling salesmen, headwaiters, and occasional professors of English literature.' Mr. Morley grew a beard some years ago as a memorial to a man who, in his turn, had grown a beard as a memorial to Herman Melville." #LiteraryGhostBeards!
The Grim Reader knows: "She once carried the dead. Now she carries stories. Winnie is a 2004 Cadillac DeVille hearse and a local Atlanta lady. Named after the Winchester from Shaun of the Dead, a nod to the classics, Winnie is more than just a vehicle. She is a rolling crypt of strange tales, shadowy characters, and the kind of magic you only find between pages."