Even if I had had the facts in hand, they would not have deterred me. If vows of poverty were necessary, I was ready to take them. And I refused to be distressed by the expressions on people’s faces when I confided that I was about to make a living selling books. Sell freight, yes. Sell bonds or stocks or insurance, certainly. Sell pots and pans. But books!
And I was not only going to sell books—I was going to sell real books: those that dealt seriously and truly with the spirit of man.
I had finished cleaning and decorating my little shop before it dawned on me that I did not know how to go about the next step: getting a stock of books and records to sell. A study of the classified telephone directory revealed the names of very few publishers that sounded at all familiar. Was it possible there were no publishers in Chicago? If that were the case, would I have to go to New York?
There was a telephone listing for Little, Brown and Company, so I called them. The lady there said she would be glad to see me. She proved to be very kind and very disillusioning.
“No,” she said, “the book business is not easy, and your location is bad. No, the big publishers will not sell to you direct because your account is too small. No, we at Little, Brown won’t either. If I were you, I’d forget the whole idea and go back to teaching.”
Everything was No. But she did tell me where I could buy books of all publishers wholesale, and that was the information I wanted. I hastened to A. C. McClurg’s and presented myself to the credit manager.
The fact that I had a shop, nicely decorated, did not seem to qualify me for instant credit. First I would have to fill out an application and await the results of an investigation. In the meantime if I wanted books, I could buy them for cash.
“All right,” I said. “I want to buy three hundred dollars worth of books.”
“That isn’t very much,” the man said. “How big is your store?”
“Well,” I said, “it’s fifteen feet long and nine feet wide, and I’m going to carry records, too.”