S




SELLING


In October 1964, a seventeen-year-old Londoner named Peter Rosengard was attracted by a classified advertisement in the London Evening Standard that read, ‘International publishing company launching major new publication seeks young enthusiastic management trainees’. His parents wanted him to become a dentist, but he had his eye on a sporty soft-top Sunbeam Alpine, and the management opportunity seemed to be the fastest way to get it. More than fifty years later, Rosengard recalls being interviewed by an American ‘in cowboy boots and ten-gallon hat’ promising him the world. But it was clear early on that his job would be unlikely to include any management training at all.*

The American in the hat ran a franchise of Collier’s, the New York publishing company that had been in the encyclopaedia business since the 1880s. Its twenty-volume set was now being sold in Europe for the first time, and the company would use the same sales techniques it had perfected in the United States. Rosengard remembers the set costing £240, but being told that some recipients would be paying rather less.*

‘We’re doing an advance marketing campaign here in the UK to select a number of families to receive a free set,’ he was told at his interview. ‘They can tell everyone how good they are, so when we come to sell them we’ll have a ready-primed market.’

And there was something else too. ‘As well as the set of books, there is an annual information service and updated single volume to keep ’em abreast of new developments in the world. All we ask is that the selected families sign up for this service, which costs £12 a year for 20 years; but rather than have it round their necks for 20 years, like a mortgage, they can pay it over just 24 months at £10 a month. What do you think of that, Peter!?’

‘Well that is really a fantastic offer. So they get the entire set of encyclopaedias absolutely free?’

‘You’ve got it! Absolutely free, Peter!’

The next day he found he had joined a team of about fifty new recruits. ‘Every morning we had a pep talk which ended with us all standing on our chairs. “OK, guys. What have you got?” “Enthusiasm!” we shouted. “What do you want?” “Money!” we shouted. “What are you going to do about it!?” “Rock ’em!” “OK, let’s rock ’em!” Then we all ran down the small staircase out into the street, got into our group leader’s car and roared off to Upminster or Slough, to whatever housing estate we were headed for.’

He was invited into the first house he approached. ‘We had to learn a ten-page script, word for word. I was doing pretty well in the tiny living room of this young couple and just getting to the bit where I threw open my briefcase, took out the stuck-together concertinaed spines of the twenty volumes … when my mind went totally blank. I knew I was halfway down page six but I hadn’t a clue what came next.

‘“I’m terribly sorry, but it’s my very first day and you are the first people I have done this to and actually, I have got a little stuck … but I have the script in my briefcase and if you don’t mind, I can read the rest to you?”

‘Amazingly, they were very understanding and so I got out the script and hurled the dead encyclopaedia spines across their living room; it bounced off the wall. And they signed up. I had earned £16. By the end of the first week, I had signed up nine families and made £144. As the average income in 1964 was £15 a week, this was amazing. I got the top prize at the Friday morning meeting, a silver Dunhill lighter. It didn’t matter I didn’t smoke. I felt fantastic. And that’s how I became a salesman.’

Now in his seventies, Peter Rosengard has been a salesman his entire life, although for most of it his line has been life insurance (he sells the majority of his policies from his permanently reserved breakfast table at Claridge’s). He has also enjoyed side-careers managing the eighties pop band Curiosity Killed the Cat and co-founding London’s Comedy Store.

In 1964 it took him three months to realise he was selling anything at all. He writes, ‘I was angry; I felt I had been duped.’ But he was told, ‘You can’t just knock on a door and say, “Hello, I am an encyclopaedia salesman, would you like to buy one?” You have to make them feel they have been selected. Everyone wants to feel special. We selected you for this job, didn’t we? Remember, you’re saving their children from a life of ignorance, and therefore the yawning jaws of poverty.’

The Collier’s Encyclopedia of 1964 was an updated version of the 1962 edition, containing about 15,000 illustrations and 1,500 maps. The spines suggested an engagingly diverse range (Art Nouveau – Beetle, Heating – Infantry, Infinity – Katmandu), while its clear editorial tone was necessarily pitched below the brow of Britannica. Peter Rosengard had been selling it successfully for five months, making £250 a week, when he was called to a meeting at a hotel in Kensington.

‘Guys, we have some big news!’ he was told. ‘The reason not everyone is here today is because this is only for you, our very top guys. You are being selected to go on this exciting new journey. Guys, we are going to hit Germany!’

His employers explained that the consumer protection law in the UK allowed customers a seven-day cooling-off period, resulting in a large number of cancellations. Apparently, Germany had no such policy.

‘On the ferry to Calais, I opened the briefcase we all had been given,’ Rosengard recalls. ‘Wait a minute! What’s this? I had pulled out the sample encyclopaedia we showed the families we were selling to [but] I wasn’t holding a Collier’s encyclopaedia. The name in gold print on the cover said Caxton Encyclopaedia. I had never heard of the Caxton Encyclopaedia. What was it doing in my briefcase? I’ve never heard of them and I doubt anybody else has either, apart from the Caxton who invented the printing press, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t do an encyclopaedia in his spare time.’*

His boss replied, ‘Look, it’s real simple, Pete. When you get to that page of the script when you say, “Let me show you the new Collier’s set of encyclopaedias …” all you do is say, “Let me show you the new Caxton set of encyclopaedias!” Think you can manage that?’

In the United States, a more experienced salesman named James W. Murphy was also going door-to-door. In 1969, after several successful years as a typewriter salesman for IBM in North Florida, Murphy began selling the World Book encyclopaedia, established in Chicago in 1917 as a more student friendly, less academic alternative to Britannica. He became one of the most successful members of a sales force of 50,000, and in his twenty-two years with the company he won many sales awards; he led a team in Kentucky that regularly achieved more than $5 million in annual revenue. In 2014, his son, James D. Murphy, noted that his father knew every angle of the script the company had perfected over many years. ‘He knew the objections, he knew the value propositions, and he could tell by the way you turned a book’s pages whether you were ready for the close or not.’

His father believed in his product: at home there were volumes everywhere, and he would frequently scamper away during mealtimes to find the particular book required to find a fact or settle an argument. He had a nice company briefcase containing the sample ‘A’ volume, the thickest in the set, with the most science and the best illustrations – Animals, Art, Aviation.

Murphy’s father often spoke about his sales technique as ‘a true rip ’em and stick ’em mentality’. He made ten house calls a day, usually on mothers while their husbands were at work and their children at school. If he found that the wives were hesitant to make a decision without consulting their husbands, he would leave behind the ‘A’ volume for everyone to peruse in his absence, believing it would be working for him as his ‘silent salesman’, giving the family something to think about besides the price. A complete set cost $500, but once the kids were looking at the pictures and using it for their homework, any parent would find it hard to give it back.

James Murphy Jr also became a salesman for a while, but he knew he was never as good as his dad. ‘It was paint-by-numbers, sell-by-numbers. Every action had an equal and opposite reaction that got you closer to yes.’ The World Book sales script was encyclopaedic in itself, covering all the ways to turn ‘I can’t afford it’ into a closed deal. ‘He made a sport out of it,’ his son says. ‘It was always fun. It was always a mental game.’*

Murphy encouraged his father to write his memoirs, and in Who Says You Can’t Sell Ice to Eskimos? Murphy Sr revealed techniques that he hoped could apply to anyone selling anything. There was one constant: never enter a home saying you were selling encyclopaedias. Instead, you were in the education business.*

Much of Murphy’s advice sounded like a script by David Mamet:

‘I did the first thing you got to do in selling: I sold myself.’

‘Once we’ve got the Influencer in front of the Wallet, we’ve married the end-user to the money.’

‘Parachute me in. I’m serious. You can give me a World Book sales book and an order pad, and parachute me anywhere in the English-speaking world, and I’ll guarantee, in eight hours, I’ll have a minimum of one order — and probably three. Guaranteed.’

Murphy would never lie to a potential client; he was always smarter than that. One favourite trick was to agree with a prospective buyer that for all the benefits the World Book conferred on their schoolchildren – all the visuals of the human body to help with biology, all the little biographies of the presidents – the twenty-six-volume set was still a hefty buy at $500. Who could afford to pay that for books? But a lease agreement was surely within their range; paying $20 a month for two years, perhaps, or $10 a month for four.*

And if $10 a month seemed too much, how about three dimes a day? Murphy carried a money box in the shape of a miniature book (‘They’d always take it.’). He would then drop in three dimes, clink, clink, clink. ‘Three dimes a day to put all the knowledge in the Western World at your child’s fingertips,’ he would say. ‘He doesn’t have to go to the library, doesn’t have to stand in line to borrow these volumes kids want most. Don’t have to bug your husband. I know he’s the smartest man in the world … Could you put two dimes a day in there and let your husband put one dime in — for all this month?’

It was known as the Dime Bank Close. And it had a kicker. Murphy would say, ‘I sure don’t want to take food off the table, or anything. But your husband eats lunch out every day, doesn’t he? Well, I wonder what he tips the waitress if she’s extra nice to him? And just let that settle in there a minute.’

Did Encyclopaedia Britannica push as hard? Did it need to? Would its sterling reputation and elevated position shield it from the necessity of confronting its lower-grade competition?

There was now an epidemic of encyclopaedias. Grolier, the New Caxton, Compton’s, Collier’s, Encyclopedia Americana were all different in pitch, but were all being enthusiastically sold in the territorially assigned living rooms of the United States and Europe. Because of its higher price, and the higher cost of production, Britannica’s advertising and highly trained sales force now had to fight harder to assert its dominance and maintain market share.

Which explained why, in the early 1960s, it was becoming difficult to turn a page of the Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping or the New York Times without seeing one of Britannica’s advertisements. While Vietnam occupied the news, here was a fresh battle for hearts and minds: ‘The greatest treasury of knowledge ever published … thousands of subjects that you and your family will refer to in the course of your normal day-to-day affairs … you pay later on convenient budget terms … the most readable, interesting and easy to use in our entire history … equivalent to a library of 1,000 books … think of it!’*

And one aspect of the advertisements had changed fundamentally. In the late 1950s, the campaigns altered their course. Once marketed exclusively to mature adults (‘No professional home should be regarded as complete without one … its articles are not mere outline sketches, always so unsatisfactory to the information seeker’) the focus moved in the late 1950s to younger parents and their children. The obligation of educating one’s offspring – and the guilt that would descend if you didn’t – had always been a part of the marketing kit, but now this approach moved centre stage.

‘How can you express the inexpressible love you feel for your child?’ asked an American advert in 1961 adorned with a proud mother looking at her pre-teen boy. You guessed right: education. A certain Dr D. Alan Walter advised that only through education could a child achieve ‘a full measure of success and happiness’. And because you wanted your child to be happy, ‘Children who are taught to “look it up in Britannica” are taught to inquire, to seek, to learn, to think. Could you give the child you love a more priceless heritage?’*

But these carried a fundamental misdirection. The detailed style of Britannica’s articles – written by all those world authorities, most of whom were experts often writing for their peers, and not necessarily educators – was solely directed at adults. As Harvey Einbinder explained in 1964, ‘the fact that the Britannica is not intended for children – and cannot be used by children because of its scholarly and technical content – is immaterial as far as copywriters are concerned. Their mission is to increase sales, and the truth of their copy is secondary.’*

A priceless heritage: you’re not in the encyclopaedia business, you’re in the education business



SELLING DECEPTIVELY


Beyond the highly competitive market in which they operated, there was another reason these print advertisements had to work so hard in the 1960s: the door-to-door rep was having a hard time with the authorities. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the governmental body established in 1914 to protect and promote consumers’ rights, was frequently bringing the encyclopaedia companies to account. If there was a rule to be broken, a successful sales team was breaking it; indeed, this would have been one of the prime reasons for its success.

In 1960, the FTC found that Britannica salesmen were misrepresenting the true price to the buyer. A sales brochure would be deliberately ‘padded’ to reflect a higher total so that when a buyer was offered a discount it would seem like a bargain. The New York Times, reporting on the findings, noted that the company stated a sales offer ‘was available at a reduced price for a limited time only when actually it was regularly available at the same prices and terms’. Britannica was partially successful in appealing this complaint, the FTC conceding that the padding was not $120, as it had originally found, but only $49.50 (the basic price of a set in the ‘Royal Red’ binding was just under $400). At the same time, the magazine Sales Management carried an interview with a G. Clay Cole, a senior vice-president at Britannica, who described his company’s sales presentation as ‘politely aggressive’. His encyclopaedia was ‘a product for which a feeling of immediate need must be created,’ he said. Which was perhaps another way of saying that his ultimate book of learning, with famous contributions from more than 1000 famous world authorities, was being sold just like any other can of beans in a competitive marketplace.

Britannica was far from alone, of course. Encyclopedia Americana and the New Standard Encyclopedia were reprimanded for the classic tricks: claiming the price was a limited-time deal; saying that the prospective purchasers had been exclusively selected for a very special offer; or explaining that the volumes were free if only the buyer subscribed to an exclusive phone line information service.

In 1971, the Poughkeepsie Journal revealed further sleights. Its reporter George Bernstein had been an encyclopaedia salesman in the 1960s, and not a terribly good one: ‘After all, it is pretty hard to sell people something they really don’t need, especially when the family could use some bread and butter.’ Among the techniques he failed to master: get the client to say yes as much as possible, ‘so they get in a “Yes” frame of mind; this could be as simple as asking, ‘Aren’t these colour photographs beautiful?’ He learnt never to refer to the product as ‘books’, as most clients would find this ‘a psychological turn-off’. A line that occasionally seemed to work: ‘A house without an encyclopaedia is just a house – not a home. Definitely not a home.’ Bernstein found there was little point trying to close a deal with just one half of a married couple present, as ‘the spouse that didn’t hear the pitch probably will cancel the contract.’ (He didn’t name the encyclopaedia brand he was selling.) And he was told to wear a wedding ring himself, as this would make him seem more honest and reliable.*

A year earlier, in the Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester, New York, the investigative reporter A.F. Ehrbar went undercover as a trainee with an experienced salesman from the Grolier Society, Inc. (who remained in the dark about the sting until it was too late). They called at the house of a newly married young couple. One of the rep’s colleagues would later tell the reporter, ‘Never try to pitch to rich people. They’re too smart and won’t fall for it.’

When one of the newlyweds opened the door, the salesman told them: ‘I’m with the publicity department of Grolier. I bet you wonder why I’m here. Well, don’t worry. I’m not a salesman, and I’m not going to sell you anything.’

The couple were intrigued, if a little suspicious. The Grolier man explained that he wished to use the couple as a ‘sponsor family’ in a new campaign, and in return they would get some wonderful books. Except he didn’t call them ‘books’.*

‘In return, we ask only three helps from you,’ the rep explained. He wanted to use their name in Grolier’s advertising. He wanted them to write a letter ‘telling us what you think of the product once a year for ten years’. And they needed to give him the names of five families who might want to buy the encyclopaedias (they might even make them a little jealous, given that they were getting their set for free).

At this point the reporter, who was posing as a trainee, was sent out to the car to collect the display case. ‘Never take the case in with you or they’ll think you’re a salesman,’ said the salesman afterwards. He laid out three-foot long reprints along the young couple’s floor. They were still thinking the set of Grolier encyclopaedias (and various other books including a Popular Science Library and a Child’s Guidance Program) would be theirs for free. In fact, by the end of the forty-five-minute visit, they would end up agreeing to pay $554.50.

The salesman told the couple that unfortunately his company wasn’t able to write off the total cost as an advertising expense, and they would have to pay for paper and binding. This would be $49.95 for ten years. To keep up to date they could also opt to buy the yearbooks, which they could have for almost half the price (down from $12 annually to $6.95). And if they wanted to stop getting the yearbooks, they would simply have to write in. The salesman would get $88 in commission for each set sold in this way. The reporter from the Democrat and Chronicle noted that he closed his pitch with a clever admonition: ‘Don’t tell your friends to expect the same deal.’

For a while, Britannica salesmen operated in much the same way, also suggesting the buyers would be taking part in an advertising promotion; the main difference was, they only had to supply the names of four neighbouring friends, rather than five. The difference for the salesmen (and a very few saleswomen) was that they didn’t work solely on commission. They received a $700-a-month salary, but on certain conditions. They had to complete full pitches at three homes every night (sixty a month), with the prospective buyer required to sign a document that they had been pitched to, whether or not this resulted in a sale. The salesperson would have to buy their ‘leads’ – i.e. target names and addresses – for $3 each, deducted from their salary.

There was a happy ending, of sorts: the following day the young couple in Rochester changed their mind and declined to complete the contract; they even refused when another salesman called and offered them the same books for $100 less.

In the corporate world of the 1970s, the Federal Trade Commission was widely regarded as toothless; the greater the profits to be made, the more a successful company found the fines and other reprimands – usually a cease-and-desist order – a price worth paying. In an entry in its last printed edition, Britannica itself appeared to endorse this view in its own entry on the FTC. In reference to a judgement against Campbell’s Soup Company for false promotion (it used glass marbles to make a photo of its vegetables appear more abundant than they were), it stated, ‘The FTC, however, had not been given the legal instruments or the staff necessary to effectively administer and monitor advertising. Moreover, in many cases, the FTC relied heavily upon making deals with companies, in the form of consent orders, to halt misleading or false advertising.’

In 1971, the New York Department of Consumer Affairs reported that deceptive encyclopaedia salesmen were ‘still on the scene’. It had received around 500 individual complaints. Accordingly, it had persuaded Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. to sign a ten-point ‘assurance of discontinuance’, by which it agreed that its salesmen would not ‘instil fear and anxiety’ during their pitches in the home, nor to suggest to a parent that their child could underachieve unless they bought the encyclopaedia. They also agreed not to offer a ‘special deal’ wherein a set would be sold at a cheaper price than originally stated, the reduction merely reflecting the same set in a cheaper binding. In its defence, Britannica, Inc. said it was happy to sign the assurance, but admitted no wrongdoing apart from ‘isolated cases’. This was at the peak of its doorstepping: in 1970, Britannica had about 2000 travelling salespeople.*

The department also found that Field Educational Enterprises, the publishers of World Book, frequently failed to leave purchasers with a post-paid reply card that enabled them to cancel their orders during the three-day cooling-off period. Grolier fought back, claiming the attacks were unwarranted. ‘We’re the favorite whipping boy,’ said William J. Murphy, the company’s president. ‘This is the day to be against business, against everything.’*

A year later the FTC found that Britannica representatives were still failing to reveal the true purpose of their visit when they entered a person’s home, often claiming they were engaged in ‘advertising research’. Further, the company was charged with deceiving its own prospective salespeople in its recruitment adverts. Britannica unsuccessfully took the case to the US Court of Appeals, and were instructed to remedy its deceptive practices by fully disclosing the nature of any domestic visit. In 1979, in a similar case, the FTC ordered the publishers of the Grolier Encyclopedia ‘to cease misrepresenting, failing to make relevant disclosures, or using any other unfair or deceptive method to recruit door-to-door sales personnel, sell merchandise and services, and collect delinquent accounts.’*

Perhaps the greatest shame about these stories is that the product they were selling was generally a good one. Encyclopaedia companies, through their marketing wheezes and sales representatives, had somehow managed to give their entire industry – this vast educational resource – a bad name. This was the truly dastardly irony: they were selling a valuable trove of well-intentioned and trustworthy information in a mean-spirited and duplicitous way. The industry was unable to shake off this reputation to the very end.



SEXUALITY (a diversion …)


To paraphrase Philip Larkin, homosexuality began in 1929. This was rather too late for Britannica’s eleventh edition (1910–11), which made no mention of it between Homonym and Homs, and also the supplementary volumes of the twelfth (1922), where there was nothing between the German theologian Heinrich Julius Holtzman and Honduras, nor the thirteenth (1926), an omission between the British painter Sir Charles Holroyd and the American zoologist William Temple Hornaday.

The fourteenth edition made a little headway. Homosexuality was afforded a single page, whereas Home Equipment (water softeners and electrically heated utensils) was allocated six, and Homer got fourteen. Alas, what did appear from 1929 to 1973 was disparaging, hysterical and malicious.

The subject was referred to as ‘Sexual Inversion’. The entry began by studying animals, notably apes; the suggestion was clear. The article explained that among the Greeks and certain ancient ‘pre-literate’ societies, homosexuality was regarded as a normal practice, but in modern societies it existed even when repressed: ‘The death penalty itself has failed to stamp it out.’

The article then looks for a cause, suggesting homosexuality is disproven as both ‘a genetic aberration’ and an endocrine disorder, and it dismissed the theory that it was the cause of the collapse of the Roman Empire (‘It is now thought that any deterioration in the Romans that cannot be explained by political or economic causes is better attributed to malaria than to perversion’). The modern ‘social aspects’ are regarded by the encyclopaedia as the most troubling. Homosexual prostitutes are frequent blackmailers, which ‘explains the fact that homosexuals sometimes sink down the social scale’. On the other hand, ‘not all male homosexuals are outwardly effeminate, and some can be dangerously violent’. Some homosexuals ‘have made valuable contributions to society, notably in the arts, though it is improbable that it is the sole or even the main cause of genius.’

It wasn’t until the fifteenth edition (1974) that a more modern, dispassionate view appeared, although this too sanctioned a level of disapproval. Homosexuality was a ‘sexual interest in and attraction to members of one’s own sex. This attraction usually but not always leads to physical contact culminating in orgasm.’

The entry mentioned lesbianism, and how the term ‘gay’ had become an acceptable substitute for both men and women. Historically, Britannica notes, and in different cultures, homosexuality was either approved of, treated or banned. Modern Western attitudes were said to be ‘in flux’. ‘Until the early 1970s the US psychiatric establishment classified homosexuality as a mental illness, but that designation was dropped amid increased political activity and efforts by homosexuals to be seen as individuals exercising a different sexual preference rather than as aberrant personalities.’ Possible causes are examined (Freudian; physiological events in foetal development), and not dismissed.

The Kinsey surveys get a look-in, noting the dubious finding that only about half as many women as men are homosexual, and ‘a large population of bisexuals’ are mentioned for the first time.

The concepts that all male homosexuals are effeminate or that all lesbians are masculine and aggressive, widespread in the West as recently as the 1950s and early 1960s, have largely been discarded. Similarly, the notion that homosexuals are ‘sick’ individuals who need only to meet the right person of the opposite sex to be ‘cured’ has largely given way, particularly in areas with large homosexual populations, to some degree of tolerance or acceptance.

*

As one might expect, the classification of homosexuality in religion-based encyclopaedias ranges from dismissive to intolerant. The New Catholic Encyclopedia found that

usually, temporary homosexuality is due to specific environmental conditions, such as those found in prisons, army camps, and boarding schools, or to passing emotionalism (crushes) or adolescent curiosity. Some men are homosexual for a time because nothing else is available; and some adolescents are curious and have no other outlets. The vast majority of boys who engage in homosexual activity, even for several years during their adolescence, grow out of it. Permanent homosexuality, on the other hand, is found in the true sexual invert.

*

The publication went on to examine this inversion in some depth, analysing incidence, causes and morality, before considering Pastoral Guidance. This again divided the topic between adolescence and adulthood, and between the ‘apparent’ and ‘real’ homosexual. ‘The priest must re-educate the homosexual youth on the nature of love,’ it advised. ‘All true love is a going-out of oneself, a self-giving; but, all unconsciously, homosexual love is bent back upon the self in a closed circle, a sterile love of self, disguised in apparent love for another.’ With regard to adults,

It should be stressed that a homosexual is just as pleasing to God as a heterosexual, as long as he makes a sincere effort to control his deviate bent with the help of grace … God must become the driving motive in the life of the homosexual who, otherwise, will grow lonely for the kind of fellowship found in homosexual haunts – in which he had been formerly enslaved, to which he is still attracted, and in place of which a stronger love must be found.

The sixteen-volume Encyclopaedia Judaica, published in Jerusalem in 1972, pursues a similar line. According to the Torah, homosexuality is a ‘sexual perversion’ punishable by capital punishment; Talmudic law commutes the punishment to flagellation, and extends it to lesbianism. Historically these ‘abhorrent practices’ are linked to the Egyptians and Canaanites. The prohibition of homosexuality is omitted from Joseph Caro’s Shulhan Arukh (the sixteenth-century code of Jewish law); the Encyclopaedia Judaica explains that ‘This omission reflects the virtual absence of homosexuality among Jews rather than any difference of views on the criminality of these acts,’ while noting that Rabbi Caro felt obliged to add, ‘Nevertheless, in our times, when lewdness is rampant, one should abstain from being alone with another male.’*

Homosexuality was judged illegal for three reasons. It might lead to the male abandoning his wife; it might debase the dignity of man; it will almost certainly lead to ‘spilling the seed in vain’. The practice should be confined to ‘the abominations of the sinful city of Sodom’. The Judaica concludes, ‘Whereas the more liberal attitude found in some Christian circles is possibly due to the exaggerated importance Christians have traditionally accorded to the term “love”, Jewish law holds that no hedonistic ethic, even if called “love”, can justify the morality of homosexuality any more than it can legitimise adultery, incest or polygamy, however genuinely such acts may be performed out of love and by mutual consent.’

Why are these entries worthy of our consideration today? Why should they not be dismissed as the predictable reactionary objections of organised groups threatened by the subject in hand? Because they question the very concept of the encyclopaedia. These multi-volume publications are necessarily conceived as a physical compression of definitive knowledge. Far from the historical equivalent of the rant on social media, they are instead the tablets from the mountain. The influence they impart is immense, and these particular entries (which I have predominantly culled from the open shelves of the London Library) have the power to transform lives. As the New Catholic Encyclopedia makes clear, ‘it is not unknown for adolescents who were told that they were homosexual to commit suicide.’ (The original publication date of 1967 is no sad apologia; when the set was updated for the fourth time in 1996, the text remained untouched.)

Such entries should serve as a check on the contents of all encyclopaedias, an invitation to question authorship and intentions. The notion of opinion masquerading as fact is something we’ve become increasingly aware of in the digital age, not least with the emergence of open editorial access. But it is something we should question with regard to even the most revered print editions, and something we may wonder about historically. Encyclopaedias are a mirror of contemporary knowledge, a spotlight on current learning, and we may legitimately question what sort of opinions we have formed from our consultations with apparently irrefutable text at an impressionable age. How has the monolithic reference slab – be it in our homes or in the school or local library – shaped us as individuals? Marginally, I would argue, but not entirely academically.

With regard to Britannica, the early omissions and persistent damnation were consistent with the encyclopaedia’s prudishness regarding all matters deemed potentially upsetting to adults (and necessarily intriguing to children). Biographies of the famous obscured any incidence of sexual matters that differed from either morally good or ‘normal’ behaviour. Oscar Wilde, for example, was imprisoned in Reading Gaol for offences ‘under the Criminal Law Amendment Act’, a statute most widely known for protecting underage girls. In earlier years at Oxford, Wilde ‘adopted what to undergraduates appeared the effeminate pose of casting scorn on manly sports, wearing his hair long, decorating his room with peacock’s feathers, lilies, sunflowers’.

In addition to his survey of factual errors, Harvey Einbinder uncovered numerous incidences of clumsy euphemism. Paul Verlaine’s personal life was disturbed when ‘the strange young poet Jean Arthur Rimbaud came somewhat troublingly into his life’; a later reference described their relationship as ‘extravagant’. Of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt we learn how, ‘in his later years the sway of an old and faithful servant held him in more than matrimonial bondage’. And Tchaikovsky’s marriage to Antonina Ivanovna Milyukova was described as ‘an impossible one through no fault of hers but simply through his own abnormality of temperament’.

‘The Victorian desire to make artists and poets respectable members of society is sometimes carried to amusing extremes,’ Einbinder writes, quoting the entry on Robert Browning: ‘He frequented literary and artistic circles, and was passionately fond of the theatre; but he was entirely free of a coarse Bohemianism, and never went to bed, we are told, without kissing his mother.’ The entry on Dickens from the 1930s is similarly shy of a full biography when it came to the turbulent details of his relationship with Ellen Ternan. ‘The little that needs saying has already been said,’ wrote G.K. Chesterton, an oddly terse comment in an otherwise comprehensive account (and more to the point, it hasn’t been said in this great encyclopaedia of record). Einbinder concludes that ‘Chesterton grew up under the influence of Victorian ideals which demanded moral perfection from its heroes,’ an influence that also shielded the personal life of William Thackeray.

Britannica’s influence was far greater than a regular biography, and its impact reverberated globally for decades. ‘Prudery is like a rare disease that strikes infrequently but leaves serious consequences in its wake,’ Einbinder concludes. Effectively, the encyclopaedia’s frailty when confronted with a true life lived, ‘seals off important areas of human experience from mature examination and perpetuates taboos which are no longer accepted by educated readers.’

In 1974, the fifteenth edition did modify these matters. Tchaikovsky is now definitely homosexual, as is his younger brother Modest. His marriage was hastily conceived to conceal this, and a letter to his other brother Anatoly from 1878 is quoted: ‘Only now … have I finally begun to understand that there is nothing more fruitless than not wanting to be that which I am by nature.’

The trials of Oscar Wilde and his imprisonment are also now explained, although there is still a disapproving reference to his ‘reckless pursuit of pleasure’. Elsewhere, a certain studied suggestiveness presides. Alexander von Humboldt is a ‘gregarious’ figure appearing ‘regularly in the salons of Parisian society’. He was ‘always willing and anxious to assist young scientists at the beginning of their careers’.

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.

Загрузка...