Circling the Square

A book that spends months travelling from India or Austria collects a lot of dust, and since Schoenhof's bookstore is full of foreign volumes, the air is thick and musty. In the labyrinthine passageways Mr. Paul Mueller and his ten assistants scurry around the great piles; people pop out at you from nowhere, and if you're looking for a book in anything but English you'll get what you want, even if letters have to go out to China. The firm's buying and selling with the whole world seems to have imparted a secret-service atmosphere to the place, and the attendants in their gray coats make sales in nervous whispers, every now and then beckoning the manager to come over and confirm a price, with the low, cryptic words, "One moment, please, Mr. Mueller."

Mr. Mueller himself wears a dark, striped suit and spectacles. Lending an air of Continental, scholarly suaveness to the store's Continental air of dim, dusty industry, he is always on the spot, assuring worried customers that on order to Chile will take only six weeks, or showing off his treasured collection of rare books only to those he knows share his love of antiquity. For Mr. Mueller, tall and soft-spaken, is no newcomer to bibliopoly. In Vienna, where he lived until 1939, he worked in his father's university bookstore. After eight months spent at Buchenwald, he came to American on the strength of an American passport, and worked for a while as a butler in New York. Arriving in Cambridge, he persuaded Tutin, the bookseller, to buy the failing Schoenhof's and has run it ever since as a part-owner.

Revelling in the scope of his international business, Mueller is harassed by people who want him to be a language teacher as well as a bookseller. Not long ago a man came in breathlessly, wanting an Austrian dictionary. "You know there's no such thing," Mueller explains fretfully. "It's German, of course." But annoyance is inevitable, for business is looking up. Books are pouring in now from all over the world except Germany. The French are creating like mad; every day a few copies of Pravda arrive; and Mueller is convinced that Europe is going to be as active in literature as it ever was before.

Under the regime of Mueller's gentle efficiency. Schoenhof's has become one of the two big distributors of new foreign literature in this country, as well as a small-scale publisher of German books by immigrant authors. Besides dealing in such standard items as Russian-German dictionaries and Scandinavian children's books, Mueller indulges one of his great loves by selling fine art prints on the side. The Renoirs and Pienssos add a supreme touch of individuality to the paper-covered French novels in the disorded front windows. But, evidently, love for European culture may conceivably to too far, for there's been a book on display for the last few weeks, ambiguously entitled, "How to get all you want in Norway."