Stephen Butler Leacock
[1] “Wish to look about the store? Oh, oh, by all means, sir,” he said.
[2] Then, as he rubbed his hands together in an urbane fashion, he directed a piercing glance at me through his spectacles.
[3] “You’ll find some things that night interest you,” he said, “in the back of the store on the left.” We have there a series of reprints — Universal Knowledge from Aristotle to Arthur Balfour — at seventeen cents.Or perhaps you might like to look over the Pantheon of Dead Authors, at ten cents.“Mr.Sparrow,” he called, “just show this gentleman our classical reprints — the ten-cent series.”
[4] With that he waved his hand to an assistant and dismissed me from his thought.
[5] In other words, he had divined me in a moment.There was no use in my having bought a sage-green fedora in Broadway, and a sporting tie done up crosswise with spots as big as nickels.These little adornments can never hide the soul within.I was a professor, and he knew it, or at least, as part of his business, he could divine in on the instant.
[6] The sales manager of the biggest book store for ten blocks cannot be deceived in a customer.And he knew, of course, that, as a professor, I was no good.I had come to the store, as all professors go to book stores, just as a wasp comes to an open jar of marmalade.He knew that I would hang around for two hours, get in everybody’s way, and finally buy a cheap reprint of the Dialogues of Plato, or the Prose Works of John Milton, or Locke on the Human Understanding, or some trash of that sort.
[7] As for real taste in literature — the ability to appreciate at its worth a dollar-fifty novel of last month, in a spring jacket with a tango frontispiece — I hadn’t got it and he knew it.
[8] He despised me, of course.But it is a maxim of the book business that a professor standing up in a corner buried in a book looks well in a store.The real customers like it.