The Encyclopædia Brittanica: A marriage of salesmanship and intellect

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First page of the first edition. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

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The Encyclopædia Brittanica:

A marriage of salesmanship and intellect

adéla rauchová The first Encyclopædia Britannica was published in 1771 as a culturally symbolic product of the Enlightenment in Scotland. The era was marked with a surge in innovative scholarly research that caused a state of information overload in an increasingly literate society. As a result, new genres of literature developed to accommodate the avalanche of new knowledge and, among them, encyclopædias became popular as systematically organized compendia of information.Britannica followed in the steps of Denis Diderot’s bestselling Encyclopédie and became a leading reference work in Great Britain and North America. The year 2012 has been a landmark for the title as Britannica ceased to be published in print and is now only available as an online service. Britannica’s two-and-a-half century-long history constitutes ambitious entrepreneurs and great thinkers, not to mention the door-to-door salespeople who became the purveyors of the title’s immense success. What follows here is the story of Encyclopædia Britannica recounted from a sales and distribution perspective.

Britannica is currently produced by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., a global publisher based in North America that focuses on reference and educational sectors. The rights to publish and sell Britannica have changed ownership several times throughout the course of the title’s existence and every transfer was reflected in Britannica’s methods of sales and distribution. Three prominent sales models accompanied the business strategies of Britannica during the total of 244 years in which the title was in print. The first was a combination of subscription and retail sales that applied throughout the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries. The second was a mail order model utilizing mainly press advertisements at the beginning of the twentieth century. Finally, a direct sales strategy headed by a fleet of travelling salespeople was established after

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consisted of selling individual articles on subscription. The final product consisted of three bound volumes that were then available at bookstores around Edinburgh.

The success of Britannica grew with every issue and complete ownership was taken over by Archibald Constable when the title was in its third edition in 1813. The new owner was a prominent Scottish bookseller who had first-hand knowledge of national business networks and began selling Britannica throughout the United Kingdom. Moreover, Constable established links with American booksellers in Philadelphia and began importing Britannica into the USA.

After Constable’s death in 1827, the rights to Britannica were acquired in an auction by the Edinburgh firm A & C Black, who later moved its headquarters to London and hired Horace E. Hooper to manage sales and distribution. Hooper was an accomplished American bookseller who took Britannica’s sales strategy to another level by implementing a carefully orchestrated advertising campaign in partnership with the Times newspaper. The sales model designed by Hooper was a so-called “hire-purchase system” and emerged as the first known installment- payment plan for book buying in England. Prospective customers responded to print advertisements with a down payment of £1, upon which they received the full set of encyclopædias and paid the remaining price of £13 on the basis of a payment calendar. Hooper soon opened a sales office in New York City where he, besides the successful mail-order model, also introduced a direct-sales method with travelling salesmen canvassing towns and selling Britannica to households all over the USA. However, the so-called “cold-turkey” method of direct sales where salesmen randomly choose prospective customers by simply knocking on their door did not yield as many sales as the mail-order strategy. Hooper’s domain was press campaigns and he continued the hire-purchase system in America as he did in Britain.

Hooper eventually obtained full ownership of Britannica and moved the head publishing office to the USA in 1902. Britannica retained its title in spite of its new status as an American product, because after more than a century of its existence the title had become more a brand than a description. William Benton, a later publisher of Britannica, captured the market perception of the encyclopædia by saying that he ‘doubt[s] that one American in a thousand associates the name with England’. When Hooper fell ill in 1920, Britannica was taken over by Sears &

Co., a company that had previously assisted with the title’s mail-order strategy.

Hooper’s “cold-turkey” method was completely overhauled by the new owner, who decided that print advertising was too expensive and full attention should be given to direct sales. Under the supervision of Elkan H. Powell, Britannica salesmen no longer wasted time on trying their luck on people’s doorsteps; instead they began to systematically call prospects’ houses and offices to set up appointments for a sales presentation. Once they had been invited in, the specially trained salesmen employed various gimmicks to secure a sale. Duffus

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described the book agent of the time as having not only a ‘glittering eye and a well-oiled tongue which pivoted in the middle, but also a heavy foot which he was ready to wedge into any doorway that opened far enough to permit it’. The main target audiences were families and a popular strategy among salesmen was to make parents feel guilty about preventing their children from better education by not possessing the Britannica sets. The business acumen and impertinent tricks of travelling salesmen were earning Britannica’s publishers large revenues well into the 1990s.

Kogan recounts several anecdotes that illustrate the lengths that the Britannica sales agents would go to in order to secure a sale. The author recalls a story told by a salesman who visited a farmer in Modesto, California, and tried to convince him to buy Britannica for his teenage son. The farmer was reluctant to spend the money and while the men were talking, the farmer’s son threw a rock and broke a living-room window. The salesman then turned to the farmer and said: ‘If the schools aren’t teaching your children to behave […] something has to be done. We consider our articles on “Child Psychology” and “Child Behaviour”

one of the greatest accomplishments of the new Britannica Junior.’ The farmer decided to trust the fact that information found in an encyclopædia entry could improve his son’s upbringing and responded by buying the set. A similar case was reported in Ironwood, Michigan where a different salesman kept getting a negative response from a married couple with two boys. The salesman eventually told the parents to imagine a moment ten years from now and ask themselves: ‘Did we do all for those two boys of ours while they were still with us and not away?

Procrastination is the thief of time’. The parents bought the entire Britannica set.

Customer exploitation from the Britannica agents knew few moral boundaries and Kogan’s accounts substantiate Duffus’s candid description of them as ‘the bookselling pests’ who ‘preyed on ignorance’. Interestingly, Kogan presents the anecdotes in his book as a source of inspiration for budding Britannica salesmen rather than obvious displays of shameless sales practice.

Sears & Co., predominantly a mail order business, had little interest in pursuing book publishing further and eventually decided to sell Britannica in 1943. The transfer resulted in the formation of Encyclopædia Britannica Inc.

(EB Inc.); this title has been maintained to the present day. EB Inc. successfully

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has then, in theory, returned to the original sales model of individual subscriptions from the days of its first issue in the eighteenth century—only now in a digital format.

Bibliography

Duffus, R. L. Books: Their Place In Democracy. Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1930.

Greenstein S. and M. Devereux. “The Crisis at Encyclopædia Britannica.” Research Case at the Kellogg School of Management. 28 July 2009. 14 Nov. 2012 <http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/

greenstein/images/htm/Research/Cases/EncyclopaediaBritannica_DNC_0809.pdf>.

Kogan, H. The Great EB: The Story of Encyclopædia Britannica. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Panelas, T. “Encyclopaedia Britannica To End Print Edition, Go Completely Digital.” Encyclopaedia Britannica News. 14 March 2012. 13 November 2012 <http://corporate.britannica.com/

encyclopaedia-britannica-to-endprint-edition-go-completely-digital/>.

Vliet, R. van. “Print and Public In Europe 1600-1800.” A Companion to the History of the Book. Eds. S.

Eliot and J. Rose. Chichester: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2009.

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