The Man Who Knows His Books
A spotlessly clean little store on Thirty-eighth Street near Sixth Avenue, book shelves all around the walls, friendly pictures right beneath the ceiling. In the middle of the room a little desk, and in a chair before it Mr. Corbett, who prides himself on having read every book that he ever sold. Jack London used to spend hours here whenever he was in New York, and Edwin Markham received a good deal of inspiration from Mr. Corbett’s suggestions. Literary hack writers are his daily visitors; to call them customers would be too optimistic. He dreams of magazine articles, he invents titles for them and he sells you for a few pennies all the material to write them if you happen to be a journalist on the lookout for suggestions.
He has his own peculiar ideas of what people should read and what they shouldn’t read, and it is not an unusual occurrence that, for instance, a young girl should enter his shop and ask for a certain book, and he would answer: “Yes, I have it, but you shouldn’t read it, and I won’t sell it to you.” And then he will tell her about some other book, and picture it in such desirable colors that she will change her mind and buy it instead.
“You know,” he told me once, “the bookseller has a very important mission in life. The writer writes his books, but he doesn’t know into whose hands they will fall, the publisher sells them as merchandise to dealers all over the country, but we little shop-keepers come in contact with the real readers. It’s up to us to place something in their hands that might be decisive for their future career, that might inspire them to great and noble thoughts, and that might make criminals out of them. A few pennies that we might gain might mean the perdition of lives and souls.”