The Haunted Bookshop

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.

There is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.

ON THE RETURN OF A BOOK LENT TO A FRIEND I GIVE humble and hearty thanks for the safe return of this book which having endured the perils of my friend's bookcase, and the bookcases of my friend's friends, now returns to me in reasonably good condition. I GIVE humble and hearty thanks that my friend did not see fit to give this book to his infant as a plaything, nor use it as an ash-tray for his burning cigar, nor as a teething-ring for his mastiff. WHEN I lent this book I deemed it as lost: I was resigned to the bitterness of the long parting: I never thought to look upon its pages again. BUT NOW that my book is come back to me, I rejoice and am exceeding glad! Bring hither the fatted morocco and let us rebind the volume and set it on the shelf of honour: for this my book was lent, and is returned again. PRESENTLY, therefore, I may return some of the books that I myself have borrowed.

That's why I call this place the Haunted Bookshop. Haunted by the ghosts of the books I haven't read. 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.

Long ago I fell back on books as the only permanent consolers. They are the one stainless and unimpeachable achievement of the human race. It saddens me to think that I shall have to die with thousands of books unread that would have given me noble and unblemished happiness.

Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives. Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world--the brains of men.

A doctor is advertised by the bodies he cures. My business is advertised by the minds I stimulate. And let me tell you that the book business is different from other trades. People don't know they want books. I can see just by looking at you that your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully unaware of it!

I wish there could be an international peace conference of booksellers, for (you will smile at this) my own conviction is that the future happiness of the world depends in no small measure on them and on the librarians.

The human mind appears suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknown and unimaginable void. It passes half its known life in the mental chaos of sleep. Even when awake it is a victim of its own ill-adjustment, of disease, of age, of external suggestion, of nature's compulsions; it doubts its own sensations and trusts only in instruments and averages.

Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error. A book that is good for me would very likely be punk for you.

The beauty of being a bookseller is that you don't have to be a literary critic: all you have to do to books is enjoy them.

Man is unconquerable because he can make even his helplessness so entertaining. His motto seems to be "Even though He slay me, yet will I make fun of Him!

Books are the immortality of the race, the father and mother of most that is worth while cherishing in our hearts. To spread good books about, to sow them on fertile minds, to propagate understanding and a carefulness of life and beauty, isn't that high enough mission for a man?

Mr. Gilbert had the earnest mania for self-improvement which has blighted the lives of so many young men.

Overhead the night was a superb arch of clear frost, sifted with stars.

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.

There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it.

Vede, i libri contengono i pensieri e i sogni degli uomini, le loro speranze e i loro sforzi e tutti i loro ruoli immortali. È attraverso i libri che la maggior parte di noi arriva a comprendere quanto la vita sia magnificamente degna di essere vissuta. [...] I libri rappresentano l'immortalità della razza, il padre e la madre di tutto quanto merita di essere nutrito nei nostri cuori. Diffondere buoni libri, seminarli in cervelli fertili, propagare la comprensione e l'amore per la vita e per la bellezza, non è questa una missione abbastanza alta per un uomo? Il libraio è realmente lo stendardo della verità.

Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing. Let us prescribe for you.

THIS SHOP IS HAUNTED by the ghosts Of all great literature, in hosts; We sell no fakes or trashes. Lovers of books are welcome here, No clerks will babble in your ear, Please smoke--but don't drop ashes! ---- Browse as long as you like. Prices of all books plainly marked. If you want to ask questions, you'll find the proprietor where the tobacco smoke is thickest. We pay cash for books. We have what you want, though you may not know you want it. Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing. Let us prescribe for you. By R. & H. MIFFLIN,

Human beings pay very little attention to what is told them unless they know something about it already.

Long ago I fell back on books as the only permanent consolers.

It's funny how we hate to face realities. I knew a commuter once who rode in town every day on the 8.13. But he used to call it the 7.73. He said it made him feel more virtuous.

It's in books that most of us learn how splendidly worth-while life is.

A girl of 19 doesn't react towards things. She explodes.

Laughter and prayer are the two noblest habits of man; they mark us off from the brutes.

There are only about 30,000 really important books in the world. I suppose about 5,000 of them were written in the English language, and 5,000 more have been translated. - Roger Mifflin

We have all sorts of conditions of booksellers: one is fanatic on the subject of libraries. He thinks that every public library should be dynamited. Another thinks that moving pictures will destroy the book trade. What rot! Surely everything that arouses people's minds, that makes them alert and questing, increases their appetite for books. - Roger Mifflin