BOOK CANVASSERS.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1579, 4 March 1887, Page 3

BOOK CANVASSERS.

It may be a surprise to the public at lara;e faaya the Philadtlphia Eveniuj Telegraph), to know that among the class of men bearing the business name of book agents, Bonaparte—when a lieutenant, unemployed at the capital, and too honourable to duplicate his pay accounts—took the| agency for Boulanger et Cie., the noted publishers of the Pont Neuf, for a work entitled " L'Histoire de la Revolution." Bona* parte tried to secure from the publishing company the whole department of La Vendee, but he was only given a suburban Parisian arondissement. In the foyer of the great Palace of the Louvre, amid countless bric-a-brac of the roien of Louis, the great monarch, can be seen to-day, under a glass case, the little canvasser's outfit of the great enperor, and within it the long list of names which his assiduity secured, George Washington, while surveying Fairfax County in his youth—prior to ahe fateful Braddock expedition—was a book agent. The work he canvassed —i copy of which is now among the relics of the patent office—was Bydell's " The London of Stoke-on-Trent square, American Savage How He May be Tamed by the Weapons of Civilisation." Washington sold over 200 copies in and around Alexandria, Va. Jay Gould sold books as an agent. Mark Twain sold books as an agent. Longfellow sold books as an agent Daniel Webster paid his second term's tuition at Dartmouth by acting as local agent in Merrimac County, N. H., for De Tocqueville's "America." Bret Harte was a book agent in the fall of 1849 or spring of 1850.