"This Shop is Haunted"

"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,
                Proprs.

Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop 1919 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1955), p. 13.

The Powers of Books

"Books can still wield the magic powers of Michael Scott, or Faustus, or Prospero. Eyes that never read, remain blind to the phantom dead and to the unseen presences that walk the earth—cannot call up the past world to redress the troubled balance of the present—cannot move, like Persephone, both amid the fleeting beauty of the living spring and among the ghostly meadows of eternal asphodel."

F. L. Lucas, "Of Books", in The Greatest Problem, and Other Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. 177.

Local Culture

"They were poor, as country people have often been, but they had each other, they had their local economy in which they helped each other, they had each other's comfort when they needed it, and they had their stories, their history together in that place. To have everything but money is to have much. And most people of the present can only marvel to think of neighbors entertaining themselves for a whole evening without a single imported pleasure and without listening to a single minute of sales talk."

Wendell Berry, "The Work of Local Culture", in What Are People For? (San Francisco: North Point, 1990), p. 159.

Ex Libris: Livrorvm Prohibitorvm

Ex LIB

Every time I take a trip around the library I am going to add something from a book to this blog. I want to see if it adds up to something interesting.

I intend to include every possible subject.