In nineteenth century America door-to-door bookselling was a big thing. As the country grew westward and new technologies provided cheaper production and transportation opportunities subscription bookselling became a major component of the publishing world. The book became a commodity. By some estimates by the end of the nineteenth century 70% of all books sold were sold by subscription.
Agents Wanted : Subscription Publishing in America, an online exhibit at University of Pennsylvania, provides a great introduction to this part of publishing history. It features items from the seminal collection of canvassing books by Michael Zinman.
From Lynne Farrington’s introduction:
Subscription publishers regarded books as merchandise to be produced, advertised, and sold like any other product. The works they sold dealt with popular subjects and were meant to have wide appeal. They bypassed the passive marketing of their books through booksellers, located mainly in the larger towns and cities and unavailable to or unused by the vast majority of Americans at that time, and went directly to the public with their product. Employing book agents, whose sole job was to sell their work, they supplied them with the apparatus-incomplete copies of the prospective work, referred to as canvassing books-and taught them the sales techniques needed to sell their books.
The image above is an ad that appeared at the back of a book written by J. S. Ingram on the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and published by Hubbard Bros. in 1876.
It features lines like:
“we can truthfully say that we know of no other occupation that will, with so little outlay and preparation, yield so large an income”
“Our Subscription Books are not sold in Book Stores…It is our settled purpose and resolve to keep them entirely out of book stores”
“ultimately supersede the book stores as a means of giving circulation to first-class books of a standard character”
This marketing tool was still in play in the mid-twentieth century as James Campbell points out in his New York Times review of Alex Beam’s new book A GREAT IDEA AT THE TIME The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books. The publishers sales strategy for Great Books of the Western World consisted solely of hiring “genial salesmen to knock on suburban doors and make promises of fulfillment through knowledge. In a postwar world in which educational self-improvement seemed within everyone’s reach, the Great Books could be presented as an item of intellectual furniture”
So what happened? How come no one is knocking on my door today to sell me books?
Again from the “Agents Wanted” exhibit:
– a barrage of agents at the door proved annoying to many people;
– over time books sold by subscription came to seem of poor quality: their paper was cheap and their bindings shoddy; old works were endlessly reissued with new titles; information was out of date; authors were hacks;
– the price of subscription books often exceeded that of a good copy at a bookstore;
– gluts of books on timely topics competed with each other and over-saturated the market;
– publishers and agents misrepresented their works, using the names of eminent individuals on title pages and in related advertisements without authorization; faking testimonials; and titling works in ways designed to confuse the public.
One can’t help but wonder if the rise and fall of the subscription book business is a harbinger of things to come in the book world. Will 70% of all books sold in 21st century be printed on demand? Will quality issues eventually push us back to the traditional printed book?
or will 70% of all books sold in the 21st century be sold on online? Will there be a “barrage” of online booksellers that prove too annoying and force us back to the book store?