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Salesman's Dummy / Demo Book - incomplete, as issued. No date, circa 1890s-1900, Monroe Book Company (Chicago, Illinois), 7 1/2 x 10 1/8 inches tall blue 'silk cloth' hardcover, no dust jacket (as issued), multi-colored embossed illustrations to both front and rear cover ('front' cover is 'Gems of Poetry' and 'rear' cover is 'Travels and Adventures'), floral endpapers, gilt and red nineteenth century presentation page at front of volume (not completed), interior divided into excerpts from four books, along with brown divider sheets giving the salesman his 'lines' for sale of each title, paginated separately, along with the full color covers of two children's' books, copiously illustrated with black-and-white and colored engravings and full color book cover dummies. Moderate to heavy soiling, rubbing and edgewear to covers, and bumping to all four tips and spine caps. Staining to floral endpapers. All the salesman's order pages have been torn out. Slight cracking between first frontispiece and title page, but the binding holds solidly. Otherwise, apart from a few pages with slight marginal soiling or creased tips, a very good example of this rare late nineteenth century salesman's dummy. ~CCC~ [3.0P] Salesman's samples or dummy books, which have also been called 'blads,' were used by the itinerant agents of subscription publishers like Chicago's Monroe Book Co. to entice customers to agree to purchase a copy of a work in advance of delivery. This form of marketing was common in America during the years just before and after the Civil War. This dummy book provides the salesman with samples of four books - (1) Gems of Poetry (front cover and front flap), frontispiece, title page and an assortment of 72 pages of contents (512 pages in full book); (2) Travels and Adventures: Or, 100 Fireside Tales (rear cover and rear flap), about 50 pages of sample contents following preface and table of contents; (3) Happy Hours for Girls and Boys, front and rear cover, about 50 pages of sample text; (4) Stories Bright for Each Little Mite, front and rear cover, 32 pages of text/illustrations. Neither of the 'cover' works - Gems of Poetry or Travels and Adventures - are listed in OCLC; rather, only one copy of this same salesman's dummy book is located (OCLC No. 55059522) - at University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. Among worldwide institutional holdings, only one copy of Happy Hours for Girls and Boys (No. 83346548) and one copy of Stories Bright for Each Little Mite (No. 28589616) are located - both at the University of Florida. Seller Inventory # CCC-0481-8912
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