Reviewed March 5, 2006.
Akadine Press, Pleasantville,
New York, 1998. 265
pages.
Available at Sembach Library
(F MOR).
The Haunted Bookshop is the
sequel to the delightful Parnassus on Wheels. Now the Mifflins have settled down in a
stationary
secondhand bookshop
in New York City. While Parnassus
on Wheels is a
light-hearted and humorous romance that proclaims the joy of reading, The
Haunted Bookshop, written right after World War I, is something
of a spy
novel. It keeps a little romance, since
the Mifflins have taken on a young lady assistant.
But the intrigue hasn’t aged as well as the
humor of the first book, and I found the prejudice against Germans a
bit
distasteful. As I read this book in my
cozy home in Germany,
it occurred to me that times have definitely changed!
This book
drags a little more
than the first, since Roger Mifflin occasionally goes on about the joys
of
books and bookselling. This does give
some delightful quotations, though.
“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.”
“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! . . . It’s
one of the uncanniest things I know to
watch a real book on its career—it follows you and follows you and
drives you
into a corner and makes you read it. . . . 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.”
“‘All right,’ said the
bookseller amiably. ‘Miss Chapman, you
take the book up with you and read it in bed if you want to. Are you a librocubicularist?’
“Titania looked a little
scandalized.
“‘It’s all right, my dear,’
said Helen. ‘He only means are you fond
of reading in bed. I’ve been waiting to
hear him work that word into the conversation. He
made it up, and he’s immensely proud of it.”
Here’s to
librocubicularists
everywhere!
Copyright © 2006 Sondra Eklund. All
rights reserved.
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Book Reviews by Sondra Eklund
