Parnassus on Wheels

US: Melville House, 2010. Paperback. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting.The spine remains undamaged. I imagined him in his beloved Brooklyn, strolling in Prospect Park and prea ching to chance comers about his gospel of good books. "When you sell a man a book," says Roger Mifflin, the sprite-like book pedd ler at the center of this classic novella, "you don't sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue--you sell him a whole new life." In this b eguiling but little-known prequel to Christopher Morley's beloved Haunted B ookshop, the "whole new life" that the traveling bookman delivers to Helen McGill, the narrator of Parnassus on Wheels, provides the romantic comedy t hat drives this charming love letter to a life in books. The Art of The Novella Series Too 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.