The Farmer-Bookseller
Mr. D. L. Haberson is now on Saturdays only in his little book store that seems so lonesome and solitary on Twenty-third Street near Eighth Avenue in the midst of cheap rooming houses and the noise of the subway excavations and constructions that are going on day and night. After years of toil he has arrived at the goal of his ambition. He has bought a farm on Long Island. One of those small farms on which one has to be an artist in order to make both ends meet. But he was in the book business for such a long time that almost nothing seems impossible to him, and he used to display many curious books in his shop. Especially out-of-the-way magazines, edited by out-of-the-way people, were his hobby. A small man, pale and slender, with the eyes of a philosopher, what strange desire must have taken possession of him to wish to till the soil? He installed an assistant in his shop, surely not a lucrative job, but this man told me: “I like it here. I can read all day and can save the money that I used to spend for books.” That’s the stuff most of those little book dealers are made of. They don’t aspire to commercial success. If they make a living and can read, can read constantly, that’s their reward in life.