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Updated: June 19, 2025
But here his listener's attention was diverted by the voice of the book-agent: "The very best Bible for teachers, of course, is the limp-cover, protected edges, full Levant morocco, Oxford, silk-sewed, kid-lined, Bishop's Divinity Circuit, with concordance, maps of the Holy Land, weights, measures, and money-tables of the Jews. Nothing like having a really "
The percentage offered by the subscription houses was only about half as much as that paid by the trade, but the sales were so much greater that the author could very well afford to take it. Where the book-dealer sold ten, the book-agent sold a hundred; or at least he did so in the case of Mark Twain's books; and we all thought it reasonable he could do so with ours.
A peaceful farming country this, but an unremunerative field, one would say, for the colporteur and the book-agent; and winter must inclose it in a lonesome seclusion. The only other thing of note the Bras d'Or offered us before we reached West Bay was the finest show of medusm or jelly-fish that could be produced.
With a pair of shabby gloves on his hands, and a book beneath his arms, he had suddenly become a genteel if poor old book-agent, whose appearance excited compassion.
He had at different times been an auctioneer, a book-agent, a schoolmaster, and a traveling salesman. He was just now selling curiosities and Joe felt that he would be only too glad to do Felix Gussing a good turn if he were paid for it. Our hero had a talk with this man, and the upshot of the matter was that Montgomery and the dude were introduced on the following morning.
Dropping the lines, I went down to greet the stranger, though I saw he carried a big blue book under his arm. To my knowledge no book-agent had ever been seen on the Hill. But had I never seen one anywhere I should have known this man had not come to sell me a book. "More likely," I thought, "he has come to give me a book. We shall see."
"I am merely a stand-between; that has been my business for years." "A stand-between?" "Yes, I stand between people and ignorance. I supply them with mental food, books of the first-water. They all know me, and look upon me as a public benefactor." "So you are a book-agent, then? And you want to sell me some books, I suppose? Is that your business here to-night?"
A mule furnished the motive power. "Is it a man or a woman?" said Ajax. "Possibly," I replied, "a cook." "She is about to pay us a visit. Yes, it's a woman, a bundle of bones, dust and alpaca crowned with a sombrero. A book-agent, I swear. Go and tell her we have never learned to read." I demurred.
"Do you think he would recognise in either of us one of the 'charming girls of Marchmont' that his mother painted?" "Maybe it's only a book-agent after all," suggested Claribel, hopefully. But the knocking sounded again, and Wilma shook her head.
I have had recent anatomical plates brought me for inspection, and I have actually button-holed the book-agent, a being commonly as hard to get rid of as the tar-baby in the negro legend, that I might put him to shame with the imperial illustrations of the bones and muscles in the great folio of Albinus, published in 1747, and the unapproached figures of the lymphatic system of Mascagni, now within a very few years of a century old, and still copied, or, rather, pretended to be copied, in the most recent works on anatomy.
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