The fact that encyclopaedias – our irrefutable bastions of uniformity and correctness – should view homosexuality as distasteful (at best) and abhorrent (at worst), should come as little surprise. More remarkable, perhaps, is the fact that, as the twentieth century advanced, it should devote so much of its energy to this disapproval and disavowal, evidently enthralled. One may only wonder at the true sexual tendencies of some of its editors, and the fervid atmosphere within its largely male offices.
* See Talking to Strangers: The Adventures of a Life Insurance Salesman (Coptic, 2013), which has a slightly different version of these events.
* Collier’s Cyclopedia, published in 1882, promised ‘commercial and social information’ and a ‘treasury of useful and entertaining knowledge on art, science, pastimes, belles-lettres, and many other subjects of interest in the American home circle.’ Some of the more enticing entries included ‘Hints for Stammerers’, Various Forms of Invitations’ and ‘Drowning’.
* Rosengard was almost certainly selling the first edition of the New Caxton Encyclopaedia, the bound version of Purnell’s New English Encyclopaedia, a 216-section part-work. Being a raconteur, and allowing for poetic licence, I think he knew that Caxton didn’t actually invent the printing press.
* James Murphy Jr sold Toshiba photocopiers before becoming a fighter pilot and then the founder and CEO of the consultancy firm Afterburner Inc.
* And this wasn’t a disreputable claim in itself: World Book was then published by Field Enterprises Educational Corporation. Who Says You Can’t Sell Ice to Eskimos? (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, North Carolina, 2013). My thanks to James Murphy Jr for quotation permissions.
* Several friends I spoke to during my research recalled their own youthful experience of selling encyclopaedias. As Peter Rosengard found, the job seemed like a lucrative stop-gap until something better came along. And like Rosengard, it wasn’t initially evident they were selling anything at all. When the truth dawned, so did their conscience. The architect Robert Dye recalls answering an advert looking for adventurous salesmen in the mid-seventies. A training week taught him about getting his foot in the door and closing a deal, and he remembers setting off in a car with four others to an outer-London suburb. Having talked his way into a home, and convinced a family that the encyclopaedias would be just the thing they needed (while aware they could barely afford it), he got a twinge of conscience just as the father was due to sign. He told the family he had reconsidered, left without the signed contract, and quit the next day. Another friend, the artist Naomi Frears, remembers selling to mining families in Nottinghamshire. Her sample volume contained the most impressive colour illustrations from the whole set, including the layered see-through diagrams of the human body. ‘There was a technique to keep flicking through and pausing on good pages while talking. The goal was to get them to sign something there and then, and visits were timed in the hope that only wives would be in.’
* Although it rarely revealed the price of a set in its adverts, the cost of its 1963 edition ranged from $397 to $597 according to the binding, at least $100 more than any of its smaller rivals. In the same year, the thirty-volume Encyclopedia Americana cost between $299 and $499, while in 1961 you could buy the nineteen-volume World Book in its ‘President Red’ covers for $129.
* Likewise, an advertisement for Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia in the 1960s was illustrated with a boy looking forlorn behind metal bars. ‘Is your child’s mind being imprisoned?’ the copy read.
* Britannica was not alone in this approach. In 1958, an advert for Encyclopedia Americana featured a befuddled-looking boy ringed by the latest thirty-volume set and the strapline ‘Knowledge Makes Dreams Come True’. The text explained, ‘Every ambitious youngster dreams of becoming a success. But success doesn’t come from just dreaming.’ Another advert for the same publication, this time touting the quality of its writing rather than its value to a child, contained the immortal lines: ‘Then there’s our biography of Poe. It reads like a novel. It ought to. It was written by the celebrated author-critic Joseph Wood Krutch.’ A year before, an advertisement featured a boy and a girl climbing a staircase made from volumes of the World Book. A similar World Book ad explained ‘it cost over $2,000,000 to bring you and your children’ the latest edition, as a teenager is pictured examining a volume and exclaiming, ‘Gosh, it’s got everything!’ But this was indeed a more child-centred publication, and its success may have been one of the reasons Britannica adopted a similar approach when selling its standard adult editions.
* ‘Remembrances of things as an encyclopedia salesman’, Poughkeepsie Journal, 29 July 1971, p. 4.
* ‘The Encyclopaedia Pitchmen’, Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, New York), 6 July 1970.
* The figure stood at about 1000 in 1996, the year before Google.com registered as a domain. Two years later, Britannica laid off the last of its sales team.
* New York Times, 26 September 1971, p. 1.
* In 1974, at the launch of the fifteenth edition, Britannica’s director of Educational Planning, Dr Mortimer Adler, was asked about ‘switch selling’, where a rep entered a home on the pretext they were running an educational poll. His reply, on the British television show Nationwide, was a little flustered, but he reassured viewers that, ‘I think that’s ten years ago in the past. I’m delighted to say that the selling methods have been reformed before this new encyclopaedia came out. This will be purchasable in bookstores, and no representative will ring doorbells – they’ll only come at your invitation if you want to see one. What in the United States we call “high pressure” selling has been a thing of the past.’
* The first Kinsey study of 1948 had been completely ignored by earlier printings, despite (or probably because of) its findings that a third of its male respondents had had some kind of homosexual experience.
* Produced in nineteen volumes by the Catholic University of America in Washington DC, and published by McGraw Hill in 1967.
* Likewise, the thirteen-volume Encyclopaedia of Islam (published by Koninklijke, Netherlands, latest update 2004), omits homosexuality as a feature of either historical or current Islamic life.
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THE SINGLE VOLUME
In the early 1930s, Columbia University decided it would expand its teaching facility into a new area. It would capitalise on its reputation by publishing its own encyclopaedia, and it would stand out from the crowd by cramming everything between one set of covers. The full title was The Columbia Encyclopedia in One Volume, and when it launched in 1935 the first topic to look up was Hernia. The surface area of a breadboard, the thickness of a mattress, here was an organ that had burst its regular boundaries. It had 1949 pages, and consulting it was fraught with bad possibilities, including ruptured intestines, broken limbs, and (if you dropped it on someone’s head) murder. In later years it became known as the Columbia Desk Encyclopedia, not only because it was often to be found on the issuing desk of a library, but also because moving it was like moving a bureau.