Parnassus

Roger Mifflin is part pixie, part sage, part noble savage, and all God's creature. With his traveling book wagon named Parnassus, he moves through the New England countryside of 1915 on an itinerant mission of enlightenment. Mifflin's delight in books and authors is infectious-with his singular philosophy and bright eyes, he comes to represent the heart and soul of the book world. But a certain spirited spinster, disgruntled with her life, may have a hand in changing all that. This roaring good adventure yarn is spiced with fiery roadside brawls, heroic escapes from death, the most groaning boards in the history of Yankee cookery, and a rare love story-not to mention a glimpse at a feminist perspective from the early 1900s.

In 1917, Christopher Morley published Parnassus on Wheels, a love letter to the art of bookselling. Its suspenseful sequel, The Haunted Bookshop, finds his beloved characters married and still in love with both mystery and literature. Set in a lovingly evoked Brooklyn just after the end of World War I, The Haunted Bookshop cleverly juxtaposes a pair of middle-aged bookshop owners and two young lovers with a nest of German saboteurs, complete with mysterious clues, red herrings, blushing romance, derring-do, a desperate race to the rescue, and an explosion. More important, the novel is an eloquent hymn to the bookseller's trade and a fervent plea for the revivifying and redemptive power of literature. The unifying thread of this book, and indeed of the life and work of its author, is its passionate avowal: all that the world and everybody in it needs is a good book.