s 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.

"I will tell you another reason why I don't advertise," he continued.
"In these days when everyone keeps his trademark before the public, as
you call it, not to advertise is the most original and startling thing
one can do to attract attention. It was the fact that I do NOT
advertise that drew you here. And everyone who comes here thinks he
has discovered the place himself. He goes and tells his friends about
the book asylum run by