Cool Idea of the Day: The Morley Walk

Shelf Awareness

Most of us plying the book trade have, at some point in our careers, encountered Christopher Morley's The Haunted Bookshop and Parnassus on Wheels. On August 18, Melville House, which is releasing new editions of the bookselling classics as part of its "Art of the Novella" series, "will be leading publishers, authors and readers on a walking bookstore tour throughout Brooklyn, stopping at five of the area's indie shops" while reading The Haunted Bookshop in its entirety, Bookselling This Week reported.

The goal of the Morley Walk is to both expose readers to Brooklyn's bookstores and celebrate Morley's legacy. Participants will visit Lark Café (with books provided by WORD), Community Bookstore, Terrace Books, powerHouse on 8th, Unnameable Books and Greenlight Bookstore, with an after party being held at Brooklyn's Der Schwarze Kölner Biergarten.

"I'd love to see Morley recognized as the patron saint of bookselling," said Dustin Kurtz, marketing manager at Melville House. "His books are stirring beyond belief.... These two titles stood out to us as some of the best stuff ever written about bookselling. So it made sense for us to celebrate some of the city's great bookstores while we read it."

Noting that she has "a tattered old used copy of The Haunted Bookshop that I read with astonishment and delight long before I had a bookstore in Brooklyn," Greenlight co-owner Jessica Stockton Bagnulo said the Morley Walk "seems like just the kind of philosophical, idealistic (i.e., crazy) literary thing that Morley himself would have loved. I hope people are talking about it for a long while."