Around the first of September I tend to have memories of my days selling books door to door during my college summers. I worked in what was called the Bible division, because the lead book was a family Bible. I didn’t sell many, since most everyone living in my territories already seemed to have a family Bible. But we had other books to sell–a medical encyclopedia and storybooks for children, among them. And our company, Southwestern, in Nashville, was keen to try out new books. It still is, from what I can tell.
I think the reason I recall those days at this time of year is that during the first week of September we delivered books ordered during the previous three months. So by September we knew how well we’d done, and also that our 13-hour workdays would end soon and we’d be back in class, with some free time at last. Compared with the bookfield, as we called it, college was easy.
I first heard about the book business when I was a high school junior, in Dallas. I met some college guys from Southern Methodist University who netted far more selling books than I made mowing grass. It was intriguing to me, the idea of going off to some other state and seeing what you could do on your own. I wanted to be a bookman.
My parents relented as I finished high school. I memorized the various sales talks and caught a ride to Nashville, where I spent a week in “sales school.” It was held at Peabody College, right next to Vanderbilt, which I’d never seen before but where I was to matriculate that fall. The reading list included such classics as Frank Bettger’s How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling. Of course, no one wanted to start out a failure.
Our sales crew was sent to central Georgia. My roommate and I rented a place in Perry. I didn’t have a car but rode a bike or hitched rides. In August I paid $300 for a brown 1961 Plymouth Belvedere with a broken radio and a rusting trunk. It was my deliverymobile.
Parts of that summer seem to me now like something out of a Flannery O’Connor story. Once, after I’d hitched a ride near Montezuma, the driver turned off the main road and declared, as he gulped from his quart bottle of beer, “I’m going to take you where you need to be taken, boy!” Fortunately, I’m still here.
I did okay that summer, and sold a second summer, and then a third, and a fourth, and more. The bookfield was good to me, paying for college and beyond. I even bought a new car after my third summer to replace that old Belvedere. I saw much of the South and the Midwest and learned many valuable lessons, among them how to keep records and to read city and county maps.
Yet another lesson concerned the law of averages. If you knocked on enough doors (40 to 50 daily) and made enough demos to actual people (20 to 25), you’d have buyers. Sometimes the law of averages got out of whack. My first week I recorded a 0 day–meaning nobody bought. But there was also a Saturday my last summer when the first 12 houses bought. The thirteenth said no. I thanked the nonbuyer for her time and mentioned that it was against the law of averages for so many people to have consecutively bought. She changed her mind and wrote a check.
My wife and daughter long ago tired of my book-selling recollections. But recently, during a business lunch in a fancy Washington restaurant, the Southwestern Company was mentioned, and I was asked which years I’d sold books. The question came, I soon learned, from another Southwestern alum. I realized I had permission, so to speak, to recall those days. And so I did. The sophisticated lawyer who’d scheduled the lunch listened intently, before marveling that there was a lot more going on out in the country than he and his fellow New Yorkers ever imagined when they were growing up.
Southwestern still has students going door to door–some 3,000 this past summer, according to USA Today. As far as I know, none has ever knocked on our door, though one easily could have. I know that because a few years ago I saw a Southwestern book–a one-volume encyclopedia–in our friend Dana’s house, four doors away. I knew Dana couldn’t have been an easy sell, and she confirmed that she hadn’t invited the bookwoman inside. Dana had bought from her right there on the front steps!
Somehow, skilled though she was, the bookwoman missed our house. I wonder how long it would have taken me to buy.
TERRY EASTLAND
