Humours Op The Book Shop

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Title:     Humours Op The Book Shop
Author: Robert Cortes Holliday [More Titles by Holliday]

The panorama before his view is the human mind. He panders to its divers follies, consults its varied wisdom. He stands umbrellaless in the rain of all its idiosyncrasies. Why has he not lifted up his voice? He, the book clerk, that lives among countless volumes of confessions! Whose daily task is to wrestle hour by hour with a living Comedie Humaine! Has the constant spectacle of so many books been astringent in its effect upon any latent creative impulse? Or has he been dumb in the colloquial sense, forsooth; a figure like Mr. Whistler's guard in the British Museum? Sundry "lettered booksellers" of England have, indeed, given us some reminiscences of bookselling and its humours. But they were the old boys. They belonged to an old order and reflected another day. "As physicians are called 'The Faculty' and counsellors-at-law 'The Profession,'" writes Boswell, "the booksellers of London are called 'The Trade.'" Let us look into this Trade as it is to-day, we said. So for a space we played we were a book clerk.

There are two, decidedly contradictory, popular conceptions of the man whose business it is to sell books. One is the sentimental notion of an old gentleman in a "stovepipe hat," a dreamer and an idealist, who keeps a second-hand stall. The most delightful pictures of him are in the pages of Anatole France. He is a man of much erudition. And books are his wife and family, food and drink. Then there is the other idea. "Why is it," we report the remark of an important looking gentleman in a high hat, "that clerks in book stores never know anything about books?" (or anything else, was perhaps not far from his thought.) This gentleman, it was readily perceived, had an idea that he had said something rather good. But it was not new. This conception of the book clerk is one of the world's seven jokes--brother to that of the mother-in-law. The book clerk of this view is a familiar figure in the pages of humour, like the talkative barber or the comic Irishman of the vaudeville stage--a stock character. His illiteracy is classic; his ignorant sayings irresistable. He was sired by Charles Keene and damned by Punch. Phil May was his godfather; and every industrious humourist employs him periodically. These two ideas of the book business are perhaps reconciled by the popularly cherished sentiment that book sellers are not what they were. Newspapers from time to time print feature articles about the days "When Book Sellers Knew Books." If you ask a salesman in a modern book shop if he has "Praed," you of course expect him to reply, "I have, sir (or madam), but it doesn't seem to do any good."

Well, at the Zoo there is humour from the inside looking out, as well as from the outside looking in. The book clerk is in the position to remark certain human phenomena patent to him beyond the view of any other, most curious, perhaps, among them a pleasant hypocrisy. "Oh!" purls a sweet lady, pausing to glance for the space of a second at her surroundings, "I think books are just fine!" "I love to be in a book store," rattles a vivacious young woman. "Books have the greatest fascination for me," says another. A young lady waiting for friends looks out of the front door the entire time. Her friends express regret at having kept her waiting. "Oh!" she exclaims, "I have been so happy here"--glancing quickly around at the books--"I should just like to be left here a couple of years." There is a respectful pause by all for an instant, each bringing into her face an expression of adoration for the dear things of the mind. Then, chatting gaily, the party hastens away. We turn to hear, "Oh, wouldn't you love to live in a book shop!"

What is it that all men say in a book shop? The great say it, even, and the far from great. Each in his turn looks solemnly at his companion or at the salesman and says: "Of the making of books there is no end." Then each in his turn lights into a smile. He has said something pretty good.

"There are persons esteemed on their reputation," says the "Imitation of Christ," "who by showing themselves destroy the opinion one had of them." Though one might think it would be the other way, it is difficult, indeed, to sell a book to a friend of the author. "Oh, I know the man who wrote that," is the reply. "I wouldn't read a book of his." You see, a great writer must be dead. A common error of book buyers is to confuse the words edition and copy. "Let me have a clean edition of this," is frequently asked. Once a lady asked for something "bound in gingham." No one, it is our belief, ever sold a light book to a Japanese. They are the book clerk's dread. Terribly intelligent, somewhat unintelligible in their handling of our language, they always want something exceedingly difficult to find, something usually on military or political science, harbour construction or the most recondite form of philosophy.

Then there are the remarkable people who "keep up" with the flood of fiction; who say, "Oh, I've read that," in a tone which implies that they are not so far behind as that! "Have you no new novels?" they inquire. Novels get "old," one might suppose, like eggs, in a couple of days. The quest of these seekers of books suggests the story of the lady at a public library who, upon being told that seven new novels had come in that morning, said, "Give me, please, the one that came in last." There are, too, those singular folks who appear regularly every year just before Christmas, buy a great quantity of books for presents, and disappear again until the next year just before the holiday season. What, we have wondered, do they do about books the rest of the time? Ministers are always very trying characters to book clerks. "Beware of the gallery," says a fellow serf to us, "there's a minister browsing around up there." The official servants of the Lord fall, in the book clerk's mind, into that class technically described by him as "stickers." All gentlemen wearing high hats also belong to this classification. Deaf customers are embarrassing, for the reason that one always addresses one's next customer as though he were deaf, too. Foreigners are invariably very polite to clerks. They bow when they enter and take off their hats upon leaving. Very respectful people. "There," said a fellow thrall, "come two old women in at the door. Now, if I were my ancestor, I'd dance around that table with a stone club and brain them." As it is, they ask, "Have you Hopkinson Smith's 'Gondola Days'?" He says, "I think so." A lady, very rich and important looking, wants a book "without an unpleasant ending." "I wonder how this is" (looking at the last page). "No" (closing the book with a thump), "that won't do." A gentleman orders two sets of the Prayer Book and Hymnal, to be marked upon the cover with his name, the words Grace Church and his pew number. He informs us that every year while he is away in the summer his set of these books is stolen.

'Tis a merry life, the book clerk's, and a hard one. Customers: Two youngish women. "Can you wait on us?" They want to get something, do not know just what, for a present. "Oh, no!" they say, "we don't want anything like so big a set as that. Something nicely bound." A copy of "Cranford" is near by. "Oh, when I read it I didn't think it much good." "Poetry?" "No, I don't think she is much interested in poetry." "Do you suppose an art book?"------"No, she is not interested in art." "Memoirs, then?" "No, she would not care for that." "Why, I had no idea," said one somewhat reprovingly to us, "that it would be as hard as this."

A calling which requires the practitioner to turn easily from the recondite gentleman inquiring the author of "Religious Teachers of Ancient Greece" to consideration of the problem (no less recondite) of a lady anxious to find something to entertain a child of five and a half inculcates some degree of mental agility. "I want," said the very fashionable lady, "to get a book for an old man--a" (with some petulance) "very stupid old man." "I want," from a serious old lady, "to get a book for a young man studying for the ministry." "I want," exclaimed a very smart apparition, "a dashing book for a man!" "What is the best book on Russia?" "Do you know, now, if this is a good story?--there are so many poor books nowadays." Says a large, uncommonly black lady, "I want 'Spears of Wheat, No. 3.'" (Discovered to be a prayer book.) "I want the latest book, please, on how to bring up a baby." "I'd like to see what you have on 'physical research.'" "Can you recommend a book for a young man with softening of the brain? Poor fellow, he's in Bloomingdale." "Is there any discount to Christian workers?" "Do you know," a demure person, an awful blank look coming over her face, "what I want has gone quite out of my head." There is an appealing look for help. "Something American," in a patrician voice, "for the ladies to read going over on the boat. This is American, now, is it? New York society? Ah, very good! Have you anything about the Rocky Mountains, or that sort of thing?"

Now we see coming the man who has been directed in a letter from his wife to get a certain book, about which he knows nothing, and the title of which he can not decipher. Here is a person asking for "comfort books" for the sick. Here is Mrs. So-and-So, who tells us her husband is very ill, unconscious; she has to sit up by him all night, and must have something "very amusing" to divert her mind. Here is the angry man to whom by mistake was sent a book inscribed "to my good wife and true." Heaven help the poor book clerk when the same good wife and true comes in with her present of a naughty book with humorous remarks written in it!

Now, how do you like the job?

[The end]
Robert Cortes Holliday's essay: Humours Op The Book Shop

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