Thinking back on it, we had book stores back then, so people could have gotten encyclopedias from there, so how did encyclopedia salesmen make any sales??
If I recall correctly you couldn’t buy the big encyclopaedias in bookstores (dictionaries and single book encyclopedias, sure, but not the big multiple volume ones), only through their sellers or by phone.
And they often came with a subscription to get new update appendixes and the like.
(Also most of these door to door salespeople probably also carried other products, like subscriptions to magazines and whatnot; and, an average encyclopedia being at least ten volumes, going up to twenty or so, they weren’t cheap, so they didn’t need that many sales.)
If I recall correctly you couldn’t buy the big encyclopaedias in bookstores (dictionaries and single book encyclopedias, sure, but not the big multiple volume ones), only through their sellers or by phone.
And they often came with a subscription to get new update appendixes and the like.
(Also most of these door to door salespeople probably also carried other products, like subscriptions to magazines and whatnot; and, an average encyclopedia being at least ten volumes, going up to twenty or so, they weren’t cheap, so they didn’t need that many sales.)
Our family had the whole set. At least a dozen books by alphabetical order.