Be pleased to know, most worthy, that this little book is dedicated to you in affection and respect. The faults of the composition are plain to you all. I begin merely in the hope of saying something ...

If you are ever in Brooklyn, that borough of superb sunsets and magnificent vistas of husband-propelled baby-carriages, it is to be hoped you may chance upon a quiet by-street where there is a very re...

The Haunted Bookshop was a delightful place, especially of an evening, when its drowsy alcoves were kindled with the brightness of lamps shining on the rows of volumes. Many a passerby would stumble d...

The first pipe after breakfast is a rite of some importance to seasoned smokers, and Roger applied the flame to the bowl as he stood at the bottom of the stairs. He blew a great gush of strong blue re...

“Well, my dear,” said Roger after supper that evening, “I think perhaps we had better introduce Miss Titania to our custom of reading aloud.” “Perhaps it would bore her?” said Helen. “You know it isn’...

It was a cold, clear night as Mr. Aubrey Gilbert left the Haunted Bookshop that evening, and set out to walk homeward. Without making a very conscious choice, he felt instinctively that it would be ag...

Although he kept late hours, Roger Mifflin was a prompt riser. It is only the very young who find satisfaction in lying abed in the morning. Those who approach the term of the fifth decade are sensiti...

I am sensible that Mr. Aubrey Gilbert is by no means ideal as the leading juvenile of our piece. The time still demands some explanation why the leading juvenile wears no gold chevrons on his left sle...

A few doors from the bookshop was a small lunchroom named after the great city of Milwaukee, one of those pleasant refectories where the diner buys his food at the counter and eats it sitting in a fla...

Roger had spent a quiet evening in the bookshop. Sitting at his desk under a fog of tobacco, he had honestly intended to do some writing on the twelfth chapter of his great work on bookselling. This c...

Roger had just put Carlyle’s Cromwell back in its proper place in the History alcove when Helen and Titania returned from the movies. Bock, who had been dozing under his master’s chair, rose politely ...

Aubrey, sitting at his window with the opera glasses, soon realized that he was blind weary. Even the exalted heroics of romance are not proof against fatigue, most potent enemy of all who do and drea...

Seldom has a young man spent a more desolate afternoon than Aubrey on that Sunday. His only consolation was that twenty minutes after he had left the bookshop he saw a taxi drive up (he was then sitti...

Rarely was a more genuine tribute paid to entrancing girlhood than when Aubrey compelled himself, by sheer force of will and the ticking of his subconscious time-sense, to wake at six o’clock the next...

“You utter idiot,” said Roger, half an hour later. “Why didn’t you tell me all this sooner? Good Lord, man, there’s some devil’s work going on!” “How the deuce was I to know you knew nothing about it?...

Gissing Street will not soon forget the explosion at the Haunted Bookshop. When it was learned that the cellar of Weintraub’s pharmacy contained just the information for which the Department of Justic...

The latter half of this chapter may be omitted by all readers who are not booksellers. ↩ Note While Proofreading: Surely this phrase was unconsciously lifted from R. L. S. But where does the original ...