Booksellers and bookselling -- Fiction; Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.) -- Fiction; Mystery and detective stories
To the consideration of what to put on Miss Titania's bookshelf Roger
devoted the delighted hours of the morning. Several times Helen called
him to come down and attend to the shop, but he was sitting on the
floor, unaware of numbed shins, poring over the volumes he had carted
upstairs for a final culling. "It will be a great privilege," he said
to himself, "to have a young mind to experiment with. Now my wife,
delightful creature though she is, was--well, distinctly mature when I
had the good fortune to meet her; I have never been able properly to
supervise her mental processes. But this Chapman girl will come to us
wholly unlettered. Her father said she had been to a fashionable
school: that surely is a guarantee that the delicate tendrils of her
mind have never begun to sprout. I will test her (without her knowing
it) by the books I put here for her. By noting which of them she
responds to, I will know how to proceed. It might be worth while to
shut up the shop one day a week in order to give her some brief talks
on literature. Delightful! Let me see, a little series of talks on
the development of the English novel, beginning with Tom Jones--hum,
that would hardly do! Well, I have always longed to be a teacher, this
looks like a chance to begin. We might invite some of the neighbours
to send in their children once a week, and start a little school.
Causeries du lundi, in fact! Who knows I may yet be the Sainte Beuve
of Brooklyn."
Across his mind flashed a vision of newspaper clippings--"This
remarkable student of letters, who hides his brilliant parts under the
unassuming existence of a second-hand bookseller, is now recognized as
the----"
"Roger!" called Mrs. Mifflin from downstairs: "Front! someone wants to
know if you keep back numbers of Foamy Stories."
After he had thrown out the intruder, Roger returned to his meditation.
"This selection," he mused, "is of course only tentative. It is to act
as a preliminary test, to see what sort of thing interests her. First
of all, her name naturally suggests Shakespeare and the Elizabethans.
It's a remarkable name, Titania Chapman: there must be great virtue in
prunes! Let's begin with a volume of Christopher Marlowe. Then Keats,
I guess: every young person ought to shiver over St. Agnes' Eve on a
bright cold winter evening. Over Bemerton's, certainly, because it's a
bookshop story. Eugene Field's Tribune Primer to try out her sense of
humour. And Archy, by all means, for the same reason. I'll go down
and get the Archy scrapbook."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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