The Haunted Bookshop - Tapa dura

If you are ever in Brooklyn, that borough of superb sunsets and magnificent vistas of husband-propelled baby-carriages, it is to be hoped you may chance upon a quiet by-street where there is a very remarkable bookshop. This bookshop, which does business under the unusual name "Parnassus at Home," is housed in one of the comfortable old brown-stone dwellings which have been the joy of several generations of plumbers and cockroaches. The owner of the business has been at pains to remodel the house to make it a more suitable shrine for his trade, which deals entirely in second-hand volumes. There is no second-hand bookshop in the world more worthy of respect.

Christopher Darlington Morley (1890 1957), American novelist, journalist, poet, and essayist, is the author of more than one hundred novels, books of essays, and volumes of poetry. He was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, and after returning to America, he was an editor for "Ladies Home Journal" and wrote for the "New York Evening Post" and other newspapers. He was one of the founders of the "Saturday Review of Literature", and as a fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories, he helped to found the the Baker Street Irregulars, a group dedicated to the study of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle s Sherlock Holmes works. He was also one of the first judges for the Book-of-the-Month Club. He is probably best known for his novel "Kitty Foyle", which was an instant bestseller and the basis for an Academy Award-winning movie in 1940, a radio serial, and a television series.