From Michael Lieberman's excellent blog Book Patrol comes word of the University of Pennsylvania's online exhibition "Agents Wanted: Subscription Publishing in America. In nineteenth-century America, most folks lived far from a bookstore, so roving gangs of door-to-door salesmen flogged books to customers right in their own homes. It has been estimated that by the turn of the century, seventy percent of books in this country were sold by subscription.
The UPenn exhibit includes not only advertisements for the books themselves, but also a few choice selections from Bates Harrington's 1879 tell-all How 'Tis Done: A Thorough Ventilation of the Numerous Schemes Conducted by Wandering Canvassers, Together with the Various Advertising Dodges for the Swindling of the Public. Check out the whole exhibit here.--David E
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