Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - Banks of the Boneyard (Charles Kiler) [PAGE 66]

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/ Become a Book Agent

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graphic description of the premium volume of Lord Tennyson's poems together with the golden opportunity each and every purchaser was given to buy his books at wholesale. All of this we must commit to memory. The agent told of men and women who had made as much as $200 a week at that business. Now I was getting tired of milking that darn cow which was marking me with scars from the swish of her tail. Selling vegetables on commission was also losing its charm, and my sister, Reka, could take the job of assistant librarian for the summer, so why shouldn't I take a chance at this golden opportunity? I had money enough in the bank to take care of my family and finance my education in the art of salesmanship, so I signed a contract, and when school was out, packed my bag, and took an Illinois Central train for Chicago. The agent for the National Library Association had suggested the Waverly Hotel as a good cheap place to stay. The only thing I knew about it was that it had been the headquarters for the anarchists who had met in it and plotted the Haymarket riot, but as I could get a room for seventy-five cents a day, I registered there. Ladies and gentlemen, permit me to say there were things in that room worse than anarchists; after a few hours in bed I would have welcomed anarchists with their whiskers and bombs. It was my introduction to that scavenger of the bedroom, the cimex lectularius, commonly called the bedbug. Seventy-five cents for that bed! I stayed there one night and then went out on the west side to a rooming house. Years afterwards, when I was chasing items for the Inter Ocean, someone told me that I had introduced a colony of the cimex lectularius into that more or less respectable rooming house, thus causing the landlady much woe and very great expense. After committing to memory the speech telling of golden opportunities to be derived by joining the National Library Association, I was sent to Hannibal, Missouri, the birthplace of Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Samuel L. Clemens. They were the only people I knew in Hannibal. After half a day, however, I learned that the best salesman ever to work for the National Library Association, one J. P. Grier, had been in Hannibal a month ahead of me and had worked the town dry. After graduating from Northwestern Law School, J. P. Grier became a successful lawyer in Chicago. He had left a good name in Hannibal,