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The publisher’s salesman comes to the bookseller’s lair equipped with dummies. These show the book’s exterior, its size, thickness, paper, binding and (very important) its jacket. Within the dummy are blank pages, or perhaps the first twenty pages of the book printed over and over to give the volume requisite thickness. The bookseller may read these twenty pages. If the author has got plenty of action into them the bookseller is favorably impressed. Mainly he depends for his idea of the book upon what the salesman and the publisher’s catalogue tells him. He has to. He can’t read ’em all.
Sometimes the salesman can illustrate his remarks. Henry Leverage wrote an ingenious story called Whispering Wires in which the explanation of a mysterious murder depended upon the telephone, converted by a too-gifted electrician into a single-shot pistol. Offering the story to the booksellers, Harry Apeler carried parts of a telephone receiver about the country with him, unscrewing and screwing on again the delicate disc that you put against your ear and showing how the deed was done.