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Before Madison Avenue perfected its hype, before quick Internet sale, before the attraction of a mega bookstore on nearly every corner, early publishers had to develop ways to sell books to Americans moving west, away from the publishing capitals of the East. Methods to provide books to the nineteenth century western residents set in motion a creative and new approach to sales by hiring agents (or traveling salesmen) who were armed with sample books for upcoming titles as they took to the highways and wagon paths seeking members of a new nation.
These sample books are also referred to as "dummy books" or blads, and they had the look of an incomplete book because they only required sample chapters, enough to whet the appetite of readers. They were simple, unobtrusive bindings that contained samples of bindings and spines for the customer to select (leather or cloth) and, of course, a complete sheaf of lined paper to list the customer, binding choice, and payment.
The big Kahuna bookseller of this genre is Bob Seymour, who owns the Colebrook Book Barn in Colebrook, Connecticut, and began collecting in the 1960s. "When I started collecting them people usually considered them incomplete books and tossed them out or they'd end up sold for fifty cents or a dollar."
These books were easy to overlook, he explained, admitting that even after he started his collection, a Mark Twain sample book was discovered sitting on a retail shelf in his own barn.
As an investment today, he said, the books now fall into the $20 - $40 range each, with Twain being about the most desirable.
Seymour managed to accumulate more than 1900 different titles and hundreds of duplications before selling the main body of the books to collector Michael Zinman of New York. Zinman transferred this collection to the University of Pennsylvania after publishing a catalog of the books (1780 in number), and
this change of hands placed one of the largest collections of this kind of work at the Van Pelt Library at the University of PA http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/0498/0498gaz3.html.
Keith Arbour of Cambridge, Massachusetts, authored the bibliographic work for the catalog that was published as a reference work. Canvassing Books, Sample Books, and Subscription Publishers' Ephemera, 1833-1951, in the Collection of Michael Zinman (1996) is one of the most comprehensive guides to this field of collecting.
The Zinman/Seymour collection has samples dating as early as the 1820s, but very recently Robert Seymour resumed the mantle of Big Book Kahuna when he acquired an even earlier edition. This sample book for A New Critical Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language advertised a dictionary compiled by Richard S. Coxe (a mere teen at the time) that was published by Allinson in 1812.
Keith Arbour reports it is the "earliest fully formed modern American canvassing book known." It is a particularly wonderful find. Not only is it a representation of the earliest known artifact of its kind, but the publisher accumulated an impressive array of subscribers, including former President John Adams, Rhode Island capitalist Samuel Slater, Josiah Quincy, Richard Rush, Tapping Reeve, Timothy Dwight, and other notable American figures. (Each of whose signatures adds value to the book.)
These sample books have been an obscure facet of the book trade, but they represent a significant shift in the history of publishing. Until this form of salesmanship was introduced, the local printer was often writer and publisher of his own works. If another author came along, it was a print-for-hire deal or a partnership that engaged both parties in the process of selling. Providing sample books to salesmen took the responsibility of sales away from the manufacturer of the book, creating a separate function for the publisher to handle. This allowed middlemen to capitalize on a growing market that transcended the printer's geographic locale. This also created a shift from the printer having control over the book to the publisher who, when armed with a subscriber list to guarantee payment, could allow a multitude of printers to bid on the job.
For those researching canvassing books or those wishing to see samples, the AAS (American Antiquarian Society) in Worcester, Masssachusetts, has 400 in their possession http://www.americanantiquarian.org/booksamples.htm. The University of Pennsylvania has 1,780. Those without access to these institutions can still learn more through the reference book produced by Arbour. And for a quick look at the history of this genre, visit http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/rbm/agents/index.html.
And if you think this genre has run its course, there are still finds out there. Bob Seymour still holds his sampling of Twains and predicts that somewhere, within a maze of books upon books upon books that you find in many antiquarian shops, a tiny treasure such as this is just waiting to be unearthed.
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