> Does anyone know of a history of door-to-door subscription book selling
> written from the salesman's point of view?
There are some interesting materials about subscription book sales
available online, including this book which probably comes closest to
what you're looking for but from an earlier period:
Six years experience as a book agent in California, by Mrs. J. W. Likins
(1874)
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/calbkbib:@field(NUMBER+@band(calbk1+143)):
It includes chapters about her experiences selling Roughing It and other
books by Mark Twain.
If that link wraps and doesn't work, the book is listed under the
Subscription Books section on this page of my Twain site:
Historical and Social Contexts
http://marktwain.about.com/msub26.htm
Stephen Railton's Mark Twain in His Times site also includes a number of
related materials. They are listed at:
Marketing Twain
http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/marketin/mrkthp.html
I have also put online a 4-page instructional pamphlet for subscription
sales of a book about the empire created in 1898:
How to Sell the Book Entitled "Our New Possessions"
http://www.boondocksnet.com/sctexts/howtosell.html
I think it's an interesting document and a good example of why
subscription book sales ought to be studied more. Most historians tend to
read publications like the New York Times and the North American
Review to assess public opinion about imperialism at the turn of the
century. But here we have the Empire Publishing Company hiring
salespeople to go door to door to convince people to buy a book where
the whole sales pitch relied upon convincing them that the empire was
important to the future of the country.
A study of the impact of those face-to-face encounters in shaping
opinions -- about Twain too -- would be very interesting. George Ade's
article about "Mark Twain and the Old Time Subscription Book" focuses
on the books themselves and I don't know if much could be found that
discusses the sales pitch from the buyer's perspective.
Jim
Jim Zwick
[log in to unmask]http://www.boondocksnet.com/http://marktwain.about.com/
