After we were married and were creating a stable of young children we were accosted one evening by a door-to-door salesman selling encyclopaedias. The brand was Britannica, but it could just as easily have been Collins. Both products were sold by slick marketers who seldom left a household without extracting a sale. If you think accost is too strong a word to describe someone who is merely plying their trade I checked my trusty Chamber’s dictionary and saw that accost means: To approach and speak threateningly; to solicit as a prostitute. Both, in hindsight, applicable in this case.
The encyclopaedia salesmen always used the guilt factor to endeavour to sign you up to buy. Your offspring, they’d reckon, would be hugely disadvantaged if you didn’t expose them to this fountain of knowledge as a reference library to propel them to the top of their class. A purchase would eventually lead to tertiary education and a life of untold wealth from a professional vocational field of their infinite choices.
In the ultimate case they might even end up as encyclopaedia salesmen.
Door-to-door salesmen weren’t confined to selling encyclopaedias. The Rawleigh’s man sold elixirs for all sorts of ailments and essences for the most discerning of cooks. Vacuum cleaner salesmen called regularly too, and with a few sweeps over what you imagined was a spotless carpet they would produce so much dirt from the bag you were often compelled to buy. The most famous brand – and the most expensive – was the American-made Kirby. I know because we bought one.
Now Sir Bob Jones always espoused the theory that if a product was any good, it didn’t need anyone to sell it. The only merchandise worth buying, he would intone, was the one you sought to buy of your own volition - like going into a shop and purchasing the product off the shelf. If someone had to come to you and talk you into buying the product then the product wasn’t worth procuring. He particularly exampled life insurance. If life insurance was any good, he’d say, then it should be called by its more appropriate name death insurance, and there would be shops selling it across the counter.
To rename life insurance death insurance of course would put paid to the industry. I think it’s almost gone anyway.
And yet sales men and women, slick or otherwise, certainly have their place. It’s even been said they are the most important people in the industrialised society. The factory floor comes to a halt if there are not sales people at the consumer end of the chain pushing the product whether the customer needs it or not.
But todays salespeople tend not to go door-to-door. They’re ensconced in the advertising agencies making ordinary products irresistible. Salesmanship now originates in the factory backrooms where for instance they plot to apply superb paintwork and added features on the new car you don’t really need.
Perhaps the best examples of the hidden hawkers are the artists and technicians who come up with enticing brightly lit graphics on addictive gaming machines.
Incidentally, we didn’t buy the encyclopaedia, even though a redwood bookshelf was being thrown in for nothing and creative methods were offered to pay for it over an extended period. We didn’t intentionally set out to disadvantage our children either; we simply couldn’t afford it at the time, despite all of the above.
And anyway we were still paying off the Kirby.
Today, families only need to invest in a computer and go online. Encyclopaedias and all the knowledge of the world can be found in a word - Google. The Google brand is now so entrenched that the noun has become a verb. Google any subject and the popular search engine will likely as not lead you to another important word in the quest for knowledge - Wikipedia.
Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia in 2001. This community-edited nline encyclopaedia boasts more than four million articles in over 125 languages. You can add your own knowledge on any subject to the text, so the information grows.
Wales is reported as saying: “My passion is captured in the vision statement that guides my work. Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge,” and he went on to say, “And by free I just don’t mean ‘free’ as in free beer, but also, free as in free speech. People must be empowered to copy, modify and redistribute - commercially or non-commercially - the knowledge that we have to share.”
This is a remarkable statement from the founder of this incredible tool and provided the knowledge sought is not destructive, it must surely have the potential to change the world for good in a relatively short time-scale.
T. H. Huxley disagreed with Alexander Pope’s claim that a little learning is a dangerous thing. He wrote: “The saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing is to my mind a very sad adage. If knowledge is real and genuine, I do not believe that it is other than a very valuable possession however infinitesimal its quality may be. Indeed, if a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?”
I think I just heard a knock at the door. It’s probably a guy selling computers.
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