People don't go to a bookseller until some serious mental accident
or disease makes them aware of their danger. Then they come here.
For me to advertise would be about as useful as telling people
who feel perfectly well that they ought to go to the doctor.
Do you know why people are reading more books now than ever before?
Because the terrific catastrophe of the war has made them realize
that their minds are ill. The world was suffering from all sorts
of mental fevers 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?"