Page:The haunted bookshop.djvu/61

 them. Still, Jerry has a certain grain of truth to his credit. I get ten times more satisfaction in selling a copy of Newton's The Amenities of Book-Collecting than I do in selling a copy of—well, Tarzan; but it's poor business to impose your own private tastes on your customers. All you can do is to hint them along tactfully, when you get a chance, toward the stuff that counts.

—You remind me of something that happened in our book department the other day. A came in and said she had forgotten the name of the book she wanted, but it was something about a young man who had been brought up by the monks. I was stumped. I tried her with The Cloister and the Hearth and Monastery Bells and Legends of the Monastic Orders and so on, but her face was blank. Then one of the salesgirls overheard us talking, and she guessed it right off the bat. Of course it was Tarzan.

—You poor simp, there was your chance to introduce her to Mowgli and the bandar-log.

—True—I didn't think of it.

—I'd like to get you fellows' ideas about advertising. There was a young chap in here the other day from an advertising agency, trying to get me to put some copy in the papers. Have you found that it pays?

—It always pays—somebody. The