A man who can buy, and won’t buy, is like the bird that can sing and won’t sing. If you can once get him interested, and continue the argument without in any way exciting his anger, he can be made to buy. In handling a hard customer I found it a good plan sometimes to continue talking, without giving him much chance to say a word. I paid no attention to the objections he offered, knowing that in most cases they were of no weight with him, but only made as a pretext to get rid of me. I just kept on with my argument, and pretty soon he would be apt to come to time and think perhaps I was talking sense after all. If I felt him slipping through my fingers I talked all the harder, until, perhaps, the man would give me an order for the sake of my pure audacity and to get rid of me. Sensitiveness was a quality I absolutely discarded, substituting what some people would call cheek and gall of the purest and most unadulterated grade. Did I always make people buy? Well, not always; but with fair subjects at least two out of ten would succumb, and in the encyclopedia business that would mean big money for a working day. As a rule, a man is less easy to sell to than a woman. A woman is more accustomed to buying just as she has the money and opportunity. A man usually makes up his mind in advance, goes at his leisure to some local merchant and makes his deliberate selection. An agent drops in on him when all thought of making a purchase is far from him. There’s the rub. I might have to go around such a man cautiously for half an hour to get him interested. To do so successfully his curiosity must be aroused and his attention fixed. I would ask him if he had ever heard such and such a passage in a certain story. Then I would quote some very beautiful and touching extracts, or comical ones, which would make him laugh. In some way I started him in a desire to see the books. Then I was safe. Perhaps the most pitching part of all my arguments was where I used flattery. If given in the right place and in the proper proportions, like the axe and the chicken, it always reached the neck.