Small House of Everything

Small House of Everything

Thursday, January 30, 2025

FORGOTTEN BOOK: PARNASSUS ON WHEELS

 Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley  (1917)


A story of wit, charm, and grace...and a paean to the importance of reading.

The time is around 1915.  Helen McGill is a fat(ish) spinster just this side of forty.  She worked as a governess since she was a young girl; then, fifteen years ago, she pooled an inheritance with her brother Andrew and they bought a small New England farm.  since then, she has cared for her brother, doing the cooking and the cleaning, as well as any other household or farm chores that needed doing.  She has worked out the, over the fifteen years, she has baked 6000 loaves of bread for her brother.  somewhere along the line, Andrew began toying with writing.  He wrote a book and it sold and it be=came a best-seller and Andrew was proclaimed one of the greatest writers of the age.  Helen, of course, could not be bothered reading the book; she was too busy prodding Andrew not to neglect his farm duties.  Over the next few years, Andrew would take off for weeks at a time, traveling the countryside, researching his next book, and Helen would be stuck on the farm, trying to catch up on all the necessary chores required to keep the farm afloat.

One day, while Andrew was out in the fields, a strange wagon pulled up tot he farm.  It was robin's-egg blue and shaped like a van.  On the side in large red letters were the words

R. MIFFLIN'S

TRAVELLING PARNASSUS

GOOD BOOKS FOR SALE

SHAKESPEARE, CHARLES LAMB, R.L.S.

HAZLITT, AND ALL OTHERS

   It was driven by a funny-looking little man with a red beard -- Mifflin himself.  He asked for Andrew, wondering if Andrew would be willing to buy the wagon and its contents.  Mifflin had been traveling the countryside for years, hand selling his books, and now wanted to retire to his brother's home in Brooklyn and write a book himself.  He thought that, being a literary man, Andrew would be interested in purchasing the business.  Helen was afraid that Andrew would be interested in buying the "Travelling Parnassus," and would use it for another extended jaunt, leaving Helen once again to manage the farm by herself.  Helen made a spur of the moment decision.  She would buy the business from Mr. Mifflin before Andrew returned from the fields.  She had about $600 carefully saved over the years in the hopes of buying a Ford, and was willing to spend $400 of it on the wagon, it's stock and contents, the horse and Mifflin's dog.  (The horse was named Peg -- Pegasus -- and the dog was Bock -- Boccacio.)  So Helen became the owner of the Parnassus on Wheels, in part to give herself a little vacation and in part to pay back Andrew in kind.

Mifflin was going to take the train to Brooklyn.  Helen offered to take him to the train station in a nearby town.  along the way, Mifflin was instructing Helen in his own peculiar method of selling books.  The little man was preaching the gospel of reading, stopping at small farms and villages along his way, evangelizing about the value books, and selling a book here and a book there.  Cheaply, and never more than for a dollar (and seldom that).  Most of the rural places where he stopped had never had much of an opportunity to buy, let along read, good books.  They would have a Bible, and perhaps a local paper; some also had the 20-volume The World's Great Funeral Orations that had been peddled by a silver-tongued salesman travelling through the area some year before (few, if any, were able to get past the first oration).  These people were hungry for good books and Mifflin was determined to meet their needs.  He had a friendly style and was able to discern what type of book would interest which type of reader.  Mifflin would hold his customers spellbound while he told stories and read from his books.  wherever he went he made friends and sold books and his customers would look forward to return visits.  And his customers always benefited from they books they bought.  

He was careful not sell customers books before they were ready for them -- he often refused to sell copies of Shakespeare because he felt his customers could not handle such heavy reading at the moment. And Henry James?  "It always seemed to me that he had a kind of rush of words to the head and never stopped to sort them out properly."  ( Helen had taken one of Henry James's books to read aloud to her sewing circle and. after one try, they had to fall back on Pollyanna.)  Mifflin also had negative views on Nick Carter and Betha M. Clay.

It took only a few days for Helen's worldview to expand.  But also during those few days, Andrew was anxious to get Helen back.  He felt that his ever-practical sister had been conned (or perhaps kidnapped) and that she belonged back on the farm.  Andrew chased his sister and Helen, got into the losing end of a bout of fisticuffs with Mifflin and managed to convince authorities to place Mifflin in jail, but not before Helen and Mifflin had to face a band of dangerous, armed hobos out to steal the Parnassus.

Adventure, conflict, derring-do -- all the things that might make a good novel from the shelves of the Parnassus -- are here in this book.  As are spot-on descriptions of the landscape and the people of  New England.  And there are the surprisingly simple and evocative sentences. ("Distant cowbells sounded tankle-tonk among the bushes.")  And really, how can anyone argue against Thoreau, Carlyle, Treasure Island, Little Women, Robinson Crusoe, O. Henry ("there isn't anyone so dog-gone sleepy that he won't enjoy that man's stories"), or Huck Finn? 

And Mifflin says, "When you sell a man a book you don't just sell him 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 heaven and earth in a book, a real book."

Mifflin's philosophy is infectious, and so is this book 

And it is not beside the point that Helen McGill is also able to find her true self in a world that often labels and categorizes females. 


As wonderful as this book is, it was sorely in need of a copy editor.  (The story opens on Monday, October third, and three days later it was Sunday, October sixth, for example.)  And there are a number of contemporary references that might fly over the head of today's readers; i.e., a "Redfern advertisement" refers to a woman's corset; and how many will know the "Dr.. Eliot's five-foot shelf" refers to the 50-volume Harvard Classics?  No matter.  These references, enjoyable as they are, do not affect the overall enjoyment of the book.


Christopher Morley (1890-1957), a respected journalist and novelist, was one of the founding editors of the Saturday Review of Literature, and helped found the Baker Street Irregulars.   Parnassus on Wheels was his first novel, followed two years later by the companion novel The Haunted Bookshop, both of which remain in print.  Author of more than 100 novels and books of essays and poetry, among his other well-known works are Thunder on the Left and Kitty Foyle.  Morley also served as the editor of two editions of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.

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