“As I have said, we were tremendously happy until Andrew got the fatal idea of telling the world how happy we were. I am sorry to have to admit he had always been a rather bookish man…. He would read me some of his youthful poems and stories and mutter vaguely about writing something himself someday. I was more concerned with sitting hens than with sonnets and I’m bound to say I never took these threats very seriously. I should have been more severe.”

Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley is pure gold. This little book can be read in just a few sittings and will delight the reader the entire time. It is the story of a New England farm woman who buys a traveling bookstore simply so her brother won’t. What begins as a lark ends as a personal mission and way of life. And the entire time, the reader alternates between laughing and ruminating on some philosophical gem.

“I wonder if there is any kind of bunkum in higher education? I never found that people who were learned in logarithms and other kinds of poetry were any quicker in washing dishes or darning socks. I’ve done a good deal of reading when I could, and I don’t want to ‘admit impediments’ to the love of books, but I’ve also seen lots of good, practical folks spoiled by too much fine print.”

Published in 1917, this charming book is authored by Christopher Morley, but purports to be the memoir of Helen McGill. Helen, a nearly forty-year-old retired governess, is the sister to Andrew McGill, a retired businessman. After they left their first careers, the two moved to a farm together and lived a quiet and routine kind of life. One day, however, their old Uncle Phillip died, and they inherited a carload of books. That fateful day set things into motion that would prove disastrous to Helen’s quiet and well-ordered life. Andrew, a mediocre farmer, became a certifiable bookworm and made good on his threat to become a published author. Andrew would regularly abandon the farm for writing retreats, book tours, and publishing adventures. Andrew’s bookish ways were driving Helen crazy and leaving her feeling underappreciated. And so, when a book salesman arrives at the farm with his traveling bookshop wondering if Andrew would like to buy it from him, Helen buys it instead. Just so that Andrew can’t. Within just a few minutes, she packs her bag, leaves Andrew a note, and takes off in the Traveling Parnassus bookshop to have an adventure of her own. 

This story is wonderfully charming, and it is quite funny. Despite the shortness of the book, a mere 94 pages, a great deal happens. And all of this story is told so well that it is easy to imagine and is believable. It is a true credit to the author that this book is so well constructed and edited. 

“There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning, and yearning. A man should be learning as he goes; and he should be earning bread for himself and others; and he should be yearning, too: yearning to know the unknowable.”

The best part of the story is that while it is about an adventure, it is much more about what Helen calls “the evangelization of books.” The professor, Roger Mifflin, built his Traveling Parnassus because of his passion for getting good books into the minds and hearts of rural folk who did not have access to the public libraries that the urban people did. This story is a treatise on the need for bookmobiles and any other scheme for getting good, true, and beautiful books into places that are book deserts. 

A quick read, this is one that you can return to again and again for a good laugh and a lovely reminder of why reading matters. The audio is very well done by Nadia May and sounds exactly right. You can purchase it at Amazon. An excellent follow-up to this book might be 84 Charing Cross Road or Down Cut Shin Creek.