“Books divide themselves naturally into two classes,” states A. Edward Newton in his preface to the 1925 second edition of Parnassus on Wheels. There are “books that you get from a lending library, and books that you want to own.” Now-a-days Newton would have to add two more classes: books that you order for an e-reader, and books that you order from an audio supplier. I’ll wager, however, that even today anyone who has ever read Christopher Morley’s Parnassus on Wheels will, like Newton, want to own the book in its traditional form, preferably with heavy, cream colored pages and a soft leather binding. For Parnassus on Wheels is the quintessential book lover’s book. It combines a flagrant and unabashed love of reading with a gentle and good-humored tolerance for those who are hopelessly of the bookish temperament.
I first came across Parnassus on Wheels when I was working in a small bookstore in Boulder, Colorado. The manager of the establishment, upon learning that I had never heard of Parnassus on Wheels or, indeed, of Christopher Morley, gave me a copy of the novel. “Here,” she said, thrusting the little tome at me, “no bookseller is worth her salt until she has read Parnassus on Wheels.” The bookstore has long since closed, but I am still reading and collecting Christopher Morley. I have read Parnassus on Wheels at least four times and its sequel, The Haunted Bookshop, at least three. Moreover, I have literally pushed the books on countless befuddled and slightly startled friends. “Here,” I’ll say, in much the same tone as my old bookstore manager, “you can’t possibly call yourself a lover of books until you’ve read these.”
So what is it about Parnassus on Wheels that causes it to nest (figuratively) so close to the hearts of countless bibliophiles? Well first, in the words of Robert Frost, it is about a man who has made his “object in life” to unite his avocation with his vocation. Mifflin goes about the country in a kind of gypsy wagon selling books to farmers, traveling salesmen, and small-town dwellers. There’s nothing he likes better than plugging a book. “When you sell a man a book,” he says, “you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humor and ships at sea by night—there’s all of heaven and earth in a book….”
In addition to the attraction of the idea of getting to talk about books all day long, there’s the lure of getting to take your books with you wherever you go. I don’t know about you, but the nights I spend away from my books are fraught with unease and fretful longing. Hence, I pack far too many books for every trip (and no, an e-reader won’t do) and end up tired, cranky and sweaty from all the weight I have to carry. Mifflin doesn’t have that problem. If he wants to read how “the paths of glory lead but to the grave” in the middle of the night, all he has to do is to pull a battered copy of Gray’s poems from the shelves of his peripatetic caravan.
The book has a doughty middle-aged heroine who narrates the story. Helen McGill buys Mifflin’s traveling Parnassus to keep her book-obsessed brother from purchasing it. Mifflin agrees to show her the ropes before he returns to his beloved Brooklyn to write that book he’s always wanted to write. Together the two set off down the open road. During the course of a few days’ journey they encounter mystery, intrigue, romance and adversity. Accompanied by a horse named Pegasus and a dog named Bock, they have the time of their lives, and the reader will as well. This is the perfect book for anyone who, like me, is overly fond of books. It is, as Morley writes elsewhere, “a sort of fluid happiness of the mind,” untarnished by any desire other than to be a bookish story.
