The sales manager of the biggest book store for ten blocks
cannot be deceived in a customer. And he knew, of course,
that, as a professor, I was no good. I had come to the
store, as all professors go to book stores, just as a
wasp comes to an open jar of marmalade. He knew that I
would hang around for two hours, get in everybody's way,
and finally buy a cheap reprint of the Dialogues of Plato,
or the Prose Works of John Milton, or Locke on the Human
Understanding, or some trash of that sort.
As for real taste in literature--the ability to appreciate
at its worth a dollar-fifty novel of last month, in a
spring jacket with a tango frontispiece--I hadn't got it
and he knew it.
He despised me, of course. But it is a maxim of the book
business that a professor standing up in a corner buried
in a book looks well in a store. The real customers like
it.
So it was that even so up-to-date a manager as Mr. Sellyer
tolerated my presence in a back corner of his store: and
so it was that I had an opportunity of noting something
of his methods with his real customers--methods so
successful, I may say, that he is rightly looked upon by
all the publishing business as one of the mainstays of
literature in America.
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