“By the bones of Tauchnitz!” cried Mifflin.  “Look here, you wouldn’t go to a doctor, a medical specialist, and tell him he ought to advertise in papers and magazines?  A doctor is advertised by the bodies he cures.  My business is advertised by the minds I stimulate.  And let me tell you that the book business is different from other trades.  People don’t know they want books.  I can see just by looking at you that your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully unaware of it!  People don’t go to a bookseller until some serious mental accident or disease makes them aware of their danger.  Then they come here.  For me to advertise would be about as useful as telling people who feel perfectly well that they ought to go to the doctor.  Do you know why people are reading more books now than ever before?  Because the terrific catastrophe of the war has made them realize that their minds are ill.  The world was suffering from all sorts of mental fevers and aches and disorders, and never knew it.  Now our mental pangs are only too manifest.  We are all reading, hungrily, hastily, trying to find out—­after the trouble is over—­what was the matter with our minds.”

The little bookseller was standing up now, and his visitor watched him with mingled amusement and alarm.

“You know,” said Mifflin, “I am interested that you should have thought it worth while to come in here.  It reinforces my conviction of the amazing future ahead of the book business.  But I tell you that future lies not merely in systematizing it as a trade.  It lies in dignifying it as a profession.  It is small use to jeer at the public for craving shoddy books, quack books, untrue books.  Physician, cure thyself!  Let the bookseller learn to know and revere good books, he will teach the customer.  The hunger for good books is more general and more insistent than you would dream.  But it is still in a way subconscious.  People need books, but they don’t know they need them.  Generally they are not aware that the books they need are in existence.”

“Why wouldn’t advertising be the way to let them know?” asked the young man, rather acutely.

“My dear chap, I understand the value of advertising.  But in my own case it would be futile.  I am not a dealer in merchandise but a specialist in adjusting the book to the human need.  Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a ‘good’ book.  A book is ‘good’ only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error.  A book that is good for me would very likely be punk for you.  My pleasure is to prescribe books for such patients as drop in here and are willing to tell me their symptoms.  Some people have let their reading faculties decay so that all I can do is hold a post mortem on them.  But most are still open to treatment.  There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it.  No advertisement on earth is as potent as a grateful customer.