Parnassus on Wheels

I imagined him in his beloved Brooklyn, strolling in Prospect Park and preaching to chance comers about his gospel of good books.''When you sell a man a book,'' says Roger Mifflin, the sprite-like book peddler at the center of this classic novella, ''you don't sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glueyou sell him a whole new life.'' In this beguiling but little-known prequel to Christopher Morley's belovedHaunted Bookshop, the ''whole new life'' that the traveling bookman delivers to Helen McGill, the narrator ofParnassus on Wheels, provides the romantic comedy that drives this charming love letter to a life in books.The Art of The Novella SeriesToo short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time. Parnassus on Wheels is a novel by Christopher Morley, published in 1917. The Parnassus of the title refers to the mountain that was the home of the Muses in Greek mythology. In the story, Roger Mifflin sells his traveling bookshop to Helen McGill, who tires of looking after Andrew, her ailing brother. Christopher Morley later continued the story of Roger Mifflin in his 1919 novel The Haunted Bookshop .