Christopher Morley

The Haunted Bookshop Christopher Morley

The Haunted Bookshop-a fun little novella by prolific bibliophile Christopher Morley-remains in print to this day, and continues to make its welcome presence felt in the world of literature. Although the title implies ghosts, there are no supernatural elements to be found, though it does contain crime novel tropes aplenty. What starts off as a kind of collection of monologues and dialogues in praise of the bookselling profession-all very quick-witted and readable-soon turns into a mystery involving sinister saboteurs and a plot to kill President Woodrow Wilson. The book opens when a young advertising copywriter named Aubrey Gilbert steps into a Brooklyn bookstore called Parnassus at Home. The owner is a bald chain-smoking chatterbox named Roger Mifflin: Morley had previously written of Mifflin's days as a traveling bookseller in the 1917 novel Parnassus on Wheels. Mifflin is long-winded, but he's also very entertaining, and he and Aubrey have a lively discussion of the nature of bookselling, the effects of books on the mind, and the future reading in a world where books are forced to compete with entertainments such as those newfangled (silent) motion pictures.