the sound of volunteers with police-sketch flyers conducting frantic searches for yet another Polly Klass. of scam artists with low-monthly-payment schemes for repaving or refinancing or repairing what may not need any of that. Wood, has come to be the unsettling sound of true believers intent on sharing their faith. The sound of a doorbell, of a stranger's knuckles on Nowadays they peddle their goods, and their not-so-goods, by telephone. They would not have welcomed the modern promise, "No salesman will call." You had to pay for their papers of pins or their lightning rods, but the gossip came free from the two-legged, one-man newspaper and dry-goods store who roamed prairie towns and countrysides that were starved for company and talk and a new face. Willie Loman, Moses Pray shaking down widows with his gilt-edged Bibles, Elmer Gantry hawking farm implements and doling out farmer's-daughter jokes as a bonus. Until the consolations and isolations of the mail-order catalog and the two-income family and the Internet, these men peopled the census of American life and literature: the Yankee peddler, the sharp operator, the traveling Babbitt, the footloose, unfettered man of enterprise. I don't expect he died in his traces, for I imagine him to be both well-read and well-muscled, as his kind must have been since they sold the first Britannica in 1768, wearing Willie Loman's "smile and a shoeshine," though the shoes had buckles on them and the encyclopedia was a trifling three volumes. Maybe it's better that way, that he remain mythic, a man bold enough to live on commission _ and not by selling trifling eyeshadow-lipstick sets or quart bottles of floor cleaner, but on the monumental sale of a huge and expensive product, as if he were going door-to-door to sell Chryslers. I tried to find the last Britannica house-call salesman to tread the depopulated sidewalks of Southern California, but I simply could not. If this was going to be about encyclopedias, I would linger on the random-access pleasures of pulling down a volume to find one subject, then fluttering hither and yon among pages as thin as butterfly wings, distracted by other enticements, meandering from Gargantua to genomes, lost somewhere between ghee and Gobelin tapestries, the journey more alluring than the destination.īut this is about other men, the salesmen _ wherever they are. DuBois, Thomas Huxley, Matthew Arnold, MacArthur and Macauley, Walter Scott and George Bernard Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson and Leon Trotsky. Over two centuries, entries were written at times by W.E.B. The third is leather-bound, the fabled 11th edition, whose contributors included Marie Curie and Sigmund Freud _ a moving-sale bargain, the best $100 I ever spent. Another I got just after the publisher cleaved the Britannica in twain, into Micropedia and Macropedia, which sounded unpleasantly like geopolitical names for South Pacific islands. It weighed so much that the back of our green Chevy Impala sagged all the way home. One I won in sixth grade for licking every other kid in the state at spelling. I own three sets of Encyclopedias Britannica.
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