The Haunted Bookshop

Volumes disappear and reappear on the shelves, but the ghosts of literature aren’t the only mysterious visitors in Roger Mifflin’s haunted bookshop.
 
Mifflin, who hawked books out of the back of his van in Christopher Morley’s beloved Parnassus on Wheels, has finally settled down with his own secondhand bookstore in Brooklyn. There, he and his wife, Helen, are content to live and work together, prescribing literature to those who hardly know how much they need it. When Aubrey Gilbert, a young advertising man, visits the shop, he quickly falls under the spell of Mifflin’s young assistant, Titania. But something is amiss in the bookshop, something Mifflin is too distracted to notice, and Gilbert has no choice but to take the young woman’s safety into his own hands. Her life—and the Mifflins’—may depend on it.
 
With a deep respect for the art of bookselling, and as much flair for drama as romance, Christopher Morley has crafted a lively, humorous tale for book lovers everywhere.

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.