MORE OF THE BANKRUPT BOOKSELLER

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 154, 25 March 1939, Page 2 (Supplement)

MORE OF THE BANKRUPT BOOKSELLER

“The Bankrupt Bookseller Speaks Again” (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd).

Those who have not yet discovered the bankrupt bookseller have in store the pleasure of making his acquaintance through the books compiled out of scattered papers found after his death. One is not surprised to hear that the first, "The Private Papers of a Bankrupt Bookseller,” published seven years ago, is still selling well, and these who delighted in its revelation of an unusual and appealing personality will welcome the auvent of these further jottings on many subjects under the sun, but chiefly on books, books and, yet again, books. Here iu a certain rough sequence is the story of the bookseller’s life, his early childhood, his hard-working mother, his youthful employment, something of war and demobilization ami, finally, the fitting into the only niche that an imaginative reader could picture this odd character filling with any measure of satisfaction and contentment. Here are scraps of philosophy, introspective questionings, anecdotes and descriptions, all informed with a characteristic dry humour partaking, as all true humour must, of the quality of sadness of inevitability.

The bookseller is not a business success, and one cannot wonder when one reads that he buys a book because be likes it and, for exactly the same reason, perhaps, hangs on to it, refusing to sell. If he has taken a fancy to a book, that book will not be produced when would-be customers ask for it. Here is a characteristic passage toward the end of the book when the bookseller is "on the retreat.” That was a trying day when I had to interrupt my recollections about the retreat in WlB, because ot the invasion of customers.

“Really, one would think that this was a shop," I found myself saying. "Who are they to disturb my quietude?” Let me get on with the war. For months now I have been accustomed to doing practically do business, and I have been in the habit of looking upon my premises as my p.rlvate study. I must get rid of that mood. . . It is all wrong—l am here to serve the public.

Through these pages flit the figures of the bookseller’s customers, the clergymen, the booklovers, the inq>osters, and the crossword puzzle fiends; here, too, we meet his friends, his war comrades and others. They are but shadows, and one lays down the book seeing only the lonely bookseller approaching the inevitable end.