The Haunted Bookshop (The Art of the Novella) - Softcover

“When you sell a man a book,” says Roger Mifflin, protagonist of these classic bookselling novels, “you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue — you sell him a whole new life.” The new life the itinerant bookman delivers to Helen McGill, the narrator of Parnassus on Wheels, provides the romantic comedy that drives the novel. Published in 1917, Morley’s Þrst love letter to the trafÞc in books remains a transporting entertainment. Its sequel, The Haunted Bookshop, Þnds Mifflin and McGill, now married, ensconced in Brooklyn. The novel’s rollicking plot provides ample doses of diversion, while allowing more room for Mifflin (and Morley) to expound on the intricacy of the bookseller’s art. Introduction by James Mustich, Jr.

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY (1890–1957) was born in Haverford, Pennsylvania, in 1890. His mother was a musician and poet who taught him to read, while his father was a mathematics professor at Haverford College, where Morley eventually enrolled and began writing and editing for student publications. He subsequently attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. While there, he published a book of poetry, The Eighth Sin, and met a visiting American named Helen Fairchild. He then moved to New York to marry Helen and take a job as an editor and publicist for Doubleday. In 1917, he moved to Philadelphia to become the editor in chief at Ladies’ Home Journal. That same year, he also published his first book of fiction, Parnassus on Wheels. It proved so popular that he quickly wrote a sequel, The Haunted Bookshop. In 1920, Morley returned to New York to become a columnist for the New-York Evening Post, but his many enthusiasms and gregarious nature would lead him to take on numerous other jobs: he was a founder of The Saturday Review of Literature; he edited major revisions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations; he was a founding judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club; and, prompted by his enthusiasm for Sherlock Holmes, he founded the Baker Street Irregulars literary club. In 1939, his novel Kitty Foyle was made into an Academy Award–winning film. He would write more than one hundred books before his death from a stroke in 1957.