– Suresh Subrahmanyan is a Bengaluru-based former advertising professional

‘The only thing you’ve got in this world is what you can sell.’ Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman.

A few decades ago, if you paid a visit to a home with a modicum of house pride, you would unfailingly have found an entire line of leather-bound volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (EB) in their bookshelves. They would stand tall and proud alongside the Complete Works of Shakespeare, the Bhagavad Gita, The Oxford English Dictionary and possibly jostle, some Sherlock Holmes mysteries and for light entertainment, half a dozen of P.G. Wodehouse’s best and brightest.

In my living memory, I do not recall ever having taken out a single volume of the EB series to bone up on the exact dimensions of the tallest mountain peak in the world, the deepest ocean bed, the biggest star in the firmament, or the most poisonous, carnivorous plant in the Amazon jungles. These are very small samples of the enormous amounts of minutiae contained in the alphabetically arranged EB. Come to think of it, I cannot recall an occasion when my father, a professional banker, slid out an EB tome to satisfy his curiosity on the question of which was the first bank in the world to go kaput and leave its customers tragically insolvent. The only time these volumes were ever taken out of their parking slots, very carefully by my mother, was to blow the dust off the covers.

Which leads me to the inescapable conclusion that one displayed impressive voluminous EBs more for show than for any practical use. In our current digital age, this issue is purely academic, as internet searches allow us to discover the precise length of the Trans-Siberian Railway or the average number of quills found on an adult porcupine in a trice.

We now live in an age where FB rules and the EB is all but extinct, one with the dinosaur and the brontosaurus. If at all they have not been sold to the highest bidder at an antique auction sale, or conversely a ‘raddhiwalla,’ they can only be treated as museum pieces. As I have not visited a museum in ages, I have no means of knowing if EB is preserved in mothballs at some such habitat.

When all is said and done, one’s heart goes out to the encyclopaedia salesman of yore. I doubt very much if such a specimen exists anywhere in the world today, but time was when the salesman peddling encyclopaedias was the stuff of legend and song. Equally admired by his bosses and colleagues for his indefatigable spirit and courage in travelling around the countryside, knocking on doors in an often-futile effort to sell these voluminous tomes, he was also reviled by housewives who were the salesman’s primary target as he invariably dropped by when the husband was at work.

EB salesman (rings the doorbell and raises his voice) – ‘Good morning, madam.’

Housewife — ‘Who is it?’

EB salesman — ‘A burglar.’

Housewife — ‘A burglar, did you say?’

EB salesman — ‘Yes madam’

Housewife — ‘How can I be sure you are a burglar? How can I be certain you haven’t come to sell encyclopaedias?

EB salesman — ‘Cross my heart and hope to die, madam. I know nothing about encyclopaedias.’

Housewife — ‘Well that’s a relief. You had better come in then. Can I make you a hot cup of tea? I’ll put the kettle on and you can help yourself to anything your heart desires. Don’t you have a bag to put all the swag in?’

EB salesman — ‘Actually madam, I am not a burglar. I have been lying through my teeth and you were right. Profuse apologies. Can I interest you in a luxury edition of the Encyclopeaedia Britannica? There is something there about the Desert Horned Viper that will make your hair stand on end. Please madam. Take pity. As a free bonus, I can throw in the complete works of Jane Austen — the Reader’s Digest Condensed version, of course.’

Housewife — ‘Tell you what, I won’t report you to the police. You will never be able to burgle a baby’s rattle from its pram. And I have no interest in learning about the Desert Horned Viper. Look, you look like a nice bloke. Have this cup of tea and a biscuit and be off with you. I hate it when burglars walk in pretending to be encyclopaedia salesmen. Or is it the other way round? Only yesterday, I had a nice-looking chap claiming to be a serial rapist, only to learn after letting him in that he was selling encyclopaedias. You can never trust anyone these days.’

Truly, one’s heart goes out to the encyclopaedia salesman. World famous director Woody Allen summed it up rather well. ‘There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an encyclopaedia salesman?’