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.

March 28, 1957

Christopher Morley (May 5, 1890 to March 28, 1957) was a writer, more famous before his death. He occupied a position of solid erudition among the intelligentsia of the United States during his lifetime. He was one of the first judges of the Book of the Month Club, and a longtime contributor to the Saturday Review of Literature.  He revised and enlarged both the 11th (1937) and 12th (1948) editions of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.

Such a man has heroes who sell books. This is the setting for the novels Parnassus on Wheels, (1917) and The Haunted Bookshop (1919.) In the last title he describes books as producing in men the same feelings as "would happen to a cat if she had to live in a room tapestried with catnip "

And heroes who write books, people  like Thomas Hardy:

If enough thoughtful Germans had read The Dynasts before July, 1914, there would have been no war.....Sometimes I wake up at night and look out of the window and imagine I hear Hardy laughing. I get him a little mixed up with the Deity....

This last quote, also from The Haunted Bookshop , was written when the end of the war was in sight, and the cost beginning to be calculated. Morley's faith in the power of words was his least original belief.