I imagined him in his beloved Brooklyn, strolling in Prospect Park and preaching to chance comers about his gospel of good books. "When you sell a man a book," says Roger Mifflin, the sprite-like book peddler at the center of this classic novella, "you don't sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life." In this beguiling but little-known prequel to Christopher Morley's belovedHaunted Bookshop, the "whole new life" that the traveling bookman delivers to Helen McGill, the narrator of Parnassus on Wheels, provides the romantic comedy that drives this charming love letter to a life in books. ** The Art of The Novella Series **Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

Each in turn may call this a fairy story, a dog story, an allegory or a satire, but all will be moved by the beauty and the meaning--a beauty and a meaning that seems to live within the realm of those books that go on and on making friends and spreading enchantment. Gissing, its hero, is a dog who searches the world for an ideal, and then finds in the smoke of his own furnace fire a hint of the heavenly blue that he had been seeking.

A charming and entertaining novel that captures the romance of books and bookshops. "When you sell a man a book," says Roger Mifflin, protagonist of this classic bookselling novel, "you don\'t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue--you sell him a whole new life." The Haunted Bookshop finds Mifflin and his wife, Helen McGill, ensconced in Brooklyn, where they encounter some strange goings-on in their bookstore. The unraveling of the mystery provides a rollicking plot while allowing Mifflin (and Morley) to expound on the delights of reading and the intricacy of the bookseller\'s art.

Dunraven Bleak, the managing editor of The Evening Balloon, sat at his desk in the center of the local-room, under a furious cone of electric light. It was six o\'clock of a warm summer afternoon: he was filling his pipe and turning over the pages of the Final edition of the paper, which had just come up from the press-room. After the turmoil of the day the room had quieted, most of the reporters had left, and the shaded lamps shone upon empty tables and a floor strewn ankle-deep with papers.