Nothing is more exciting than making the acquaintance of an author you’ve never met before.

A friend sent me a slim, well read library copy of The Haunted Bookshop, written in 1919 by Christopher Morley (1890-1957), a work of fiction taking place in Brooklyn in the late 1800’s.

It’s 252 pages, short of Austen, maybe the lovliest prose ever gracing my vision.

My friend Ed who knows all, see Edipedia, https://athingirl.com/2013/06/04/, naturally knew about him, leading me to my library shelves where a collection of a good 20 of Morley’s novels sat waiting for me.

Ed said, there’s even a park named after him in Long Island.

My sixth book of his, Parnassus on Wheels, written in 1917 just prior to The Haunted Bookshop, simply dazzles.

Our hero, in both tales is Roger Mifflin, a lover of books with Parnassus, a mobile bookshop named after Mount Parnassus, considered sacred by the ancient Greeks as a symbol of poetry, pulled by a horse named Pegasus, in the company of a dog called Bock.

He meets up with our narrator, a Miss Helen McGill, who becomes an adorable sidekick we meet again, along with the rest of Parnassus’s cast, in Haunted Bookshop.

Like so many great writers, Jean Kerr coming to mind, Morley is out of print, but old volumes can be had on Amazon for pennies, while iBook, according to Ed, lets you download them for free.

For such an avid reader, I can’t remember the last time I’ve been this charmed…

like finding pearls in the sand.  

SB