Christopher Morley

Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing. Let us prescribe for you.

“My dear chap,” he said, “I don’t do any advertising.”

I don’t think you get me. I mean that my advertising is done by the books I sell. If I sell a man a book by Stevenson or Conrad, a book that delights or terrifies him, that man and that book become my living advertisements.”

doctor is advertised by the bodies he cures. My business is advertised by the minds I stimulate. And let me tell you that the book business is different from other trades. People don’t know they want books. I can see just by looking at you that your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully unaware of it! People don’t go to a bookseller until some serious mental accident or disease makes them aware of their danger.

Do you know why people are reading more books now than ever before? Because the terrific catastrophe of the war has made them realize that their minds are ill. The world was suffering from all sorts of mental fevers and aches and disorders, and never knew it. Now our mental pangs are only too manifest. We are all reading, hungrily, hastily, trying to find out—after the trouble is over—what was the matter with our minds.”

People need books, but they don’t know they need them. Generally they are not aware that the books they need are in existence.”

My pleasure is to prescribe books for such patients as drop in here and are willing to tell me their symptoms. S

There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it.

will tell you another reason why I don’t advertise,” he continued. “In these days when everyone keeps his trademark before the public, as you call it, not to advertise is the most original and startling thing one can do to attract attention. It was the fact that I do not advertise that drew you here. And everyone who comes here thinks he has discovered the place himself. He goes and tells his friends about the book asylum run by a crank and a lunatic, and they come here in turn to see what it is like.”

It’s a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an hourglass, to let the particles run the other way.