This little novella (with a main character named Helen!) was the perfect nugget to finish off my 2023 reading.

At just 142 pages I could have finished in one sitting had I started earlier in the day.

This is a sweet and funny story about a traveling bookseller, the woman he sells his portable bookshop to, and the many zany adventures they have in their first few days together.

Absolutely charming. ( )

Fantastically fun and witty adventure! Great read! ( )

I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a book this much. It’s written in a loping, laconic style reminiscent of Mark Twain, yet makes a serious point: good books should not be embalmed in five-foot shelves nor be the exclusive preserve of an urban, educated elite.
That, at any rate, is the conviction of Roger Mifflin, a short, bald, red-bearded firebrand who peddles books with missionary zeal from a horse-drawn wagon on rural backroads up and down the east coast. There’s an ironic twist to this democratic vision, though: he once lectured in Camden, N. J., where he maintained that Tennyson was a greater poet than Whitman (the poet who lived in their midst).
Yet Mifflin is afflicted by loneliness and decides to sell out to the author he admires most, Andrew McGill, a rustic rhapsodist modeled on “David Grayson” (the pseudonym of Roy Stannard Baker). He pulls up at McGill’s farm, and to prevent this, McGill’s sister and housekeeper Helen purchases the rig herself and sets off with Mifflin on the first adventure of her life.
So what is a good book? Let Helen tell us: “A good book ought to have something simple about it. And, like Eve, it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it. A story that’s all forehead doesn’t amount to much.” That may not be the last word on the subject, but it’s a pretty good one. ( )

Well that was just about perfect. ( )

I believe it was a character in another book who recommended this forgotten little story to me. It's about a woman who goes off adventuring in a mobile bookstore, and I'm here for that in any era. ( )