Did you ever wonder what happened to all the old encyclopedias and the people who sold them? Encyclopedias were in book form – big books with a number of volumes. You had Encyclopedia Brittanica, World Book, and Encyclopedia Americana as the most popular. There were a lot of salesmen running around, bumping into each other. Being an encyclopedia salesman was not the greatest job in the world. Quite often the salesmen faced slammed doors or people refusing to answer the door. However, many were sold especially to families which had kids in high school or college. When a student needed information on a subject that is where you had to go for information. Google was nowhere around back then. Even if it had been, there was nothing to view it on. Times were tough in those days as your new encyclopedia would soon not be up to date.
I had a friend whose older brother was an encyclopedia salesman. He was not making enough and was tired of the door slamming. He thought that he would try Fuller Brush, but they had enough salespeople. He considered Kirby vacuums, but decided that was probably worse especially in the door slamming area. Then the light bulb in his head went off. He kept selling encyclopedias, but he took a job as a milkman. Most folk liked their milkmen so he would get to know his customers and became on a friendly basis with many of them. Then after a while he would casually mention to them that he also sold encyclopedias to keep his family together.
Enough of his milk customers agreed to purchase a set to help him out. After he had sold all that he could to his milk customers, he would ask the milk company for a transfer to another area where he went through the same process. The encyclopedia folks were so impressed as he had become their top salesman, so they made him a branch manager. He worked his way in the company to VP for Sales. He might have been made CEO, but by then computers were here, and the market for encyclopedias dissolved. He lost his job. I am not certain what he does now, but I would bet that he works for Google!
Now as far as I am concerned, I used the encyclopedias in school libraries. After taking copious notes, I would do my work on my report on my good old Underwood typewriter. The typewriter was good, but I was a lousy typist. That meant that I had to do quite a bit of erasing which didn’t help the appearance of the report. It was much worse, if the assignment required copies. That meant that you had to get out the carbon paper. Carbon paper was a necessary invention, but when you had to use it, you weren’t so certain. A mistake had to be erased on the original plus any carbon copies. It was a mess and almost made you decide to quit college and become a milkman. Almost! You could always try to get a girlfriend to do the typing, but they had their own reports and were tired of fooling with carbon paper. The one time that I didn’t have to do my own typing was when I was in graduate school. There were plenty of people who would type your thesis for you, but naturally you had to pay them.
I found a nice young lady to type mine. She was pretty attractive, but had a long term boyfriend so I concentrated on just having the thesis done in time. She did a very nice job in preparing my thesis. That was good as my thesis was epic. It was entitled “The Assessment of Farm Property for the Purpose of Taxation. This thesis stands alone in the area where they are open for public inspection. I know the lady who is in charge of that area. She says that mine is the most handled of all the thesis’s that are there. She also assures me that she takes it out of the garbage can and puts it back on top of the pile!
Actually, I am pretty certain that it is on Google now – perhaps even Bing!Â
Barry Evans is a columnist for Villages-News.com.
