et department-store
one afternoon and said to the clerk at the book-counter:

"'Let me have, please, the letters of Charles Lamb.'

"'Post-office right across the street, Mr. Lamb,' said the clerk, with
a naive, brisk smile."

"You never can tell," said a traveling salesman. "Now you'd think
that a little New England village, chock full of church influence and
higher education, would be just the place to sell a book like 'David
Harum,' wouldn't you? Well, I know a man who took a stock up there and
couldn't unload one of 'em. He'd have been stuck for fair if he hadn't
had a brilliant idea and got the town printer to doctor up the title
for him. As it was, he managed to unload the whole lot and get out of
town before the first purchaser discovered that 'David's Harum' wasn't
quite what he had led himself to suppose."

Remember what Roger Mifflin says: "When you sell a man a book, you
don't sell him just three ounces of paper and ink and glue--you sell
him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour, and ships at sea
by night--there's all heaven and earth in a book."

PENFIELD--"What do you know about Bestseller's new book?"

CRABSHAW--"Nothing at all. I've merely read all the reviews of
it."--_Life_.

MANAGER--"Can't you find some way to make yourself busy around here?"

BOOKISH NEW SALESMAN--"Milton, in his 'Sonnet on Blindness,' says:
'They also serve who only stand and wait.'"

MANAGER--"Yes, but you must keep in mind that Milton's most famous
book was about a fellow that lost his job and went to hades."

"What do you think of my library?"

"I was just looking it over and I notice that you were visited by the
same book agents who landed me."

"There's a fellow outside with a volume of poems
(The title, I think is 'The Beautiful Gnomes'),
He says it's the best of poetical tomes."
"I'll see him next Christmas," the publisher said.

"There's a gentleman waiting to tell you about
A novel of his, which, without any doubt
(So he says), will make critics with happiness shout."
"Oh, tell him I'm ill or rheumatic--or dead."

"There's also a lady who's just come away
From Russia; she says that the Reds are at bay,
And she's willing to write it at so much a day."
"I've just left for Portugal, China and Mars."

"And then there's a bookseller--looks like a gink--
From somewhere out West; Indiana, I think.
I'll tell him you're out buying authors a drink."