May 5, 1890

Christopher Morley (May 5, 1890 to March 28 1957) is recalled as an American novelist now, but to his contemporaries he was also a journalist, and poet. His second novel, The Haunted Bookstore (1919) is very much a period piece, dealing with a plot to assassinate the president of the country. A love of books infuses the story, as this quote shows:

"Surround a man with Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, Chesterton, Shaw, Nietzsche, and George Ade—would you wonder at his getting excited? What would happen to a cat if she had to live in a room tapestried with catnip ? She would go crazy!"

"Truly, I had never thought of that phase of bookselling," said the young man. "How is it, though, that libraries are shrines of such austere calm? If books are as provocative as you suggest, one would expect every librarian to utter the shrill screams of a hierophant, to clash ecstatic castanets in his silent alcoves!"

"Ah, my boy, you forget the card index! Librarians invented that soothing device for the febrifuge of their souls, just as I fall back upon the rites of the kitchen. Librarians would all go mad, those capable of concentrated thought, if they did not have the cool and healing card index as medicament."

Morley was a prolific writer, and even edited new editions of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1937 and 1948). He was a book lover, and good friend of better writers, such as Don Marquis. If America was ever innocent, this quality was embodied by Christopher Morley.