1869 NEWSPAPER ADVERTISEMENT


Selling Innocents

Canvassing agents of the American Publishing Company sold Innocents Abroad door-to-door. (For more on subscription publishing, see Marketing Twain. For a simulation of how a book agent displayed a prospectus, see "Calling on a Customer.")

Agents showed buyers a prospectus version of the book that included a table of contents, a list of illustrations, a sampling of both prose and pictures, and samples of the four kinds of binding available:

DETAIL: SALES PROSPECTUS PAGE

At the end the prospectus includes four pages advertising and displaying sample pages of the American Publishing Company's Photograph Album Family Bible, which provided a section "in which family Portraits may be preserved within its sacred lids." This is the kind of sentimental rhetoric, of course, that MT's book makes fun of, but the prospectus' selection of full-page illustrations gives buyers little sense of MT's irreverent treatment of the Biblical landscape he travels through.

The Innocents prospectus displays about 10% of the entire volume.

The whole prospectus, photographed digitally in a two-page format to reproduce the way potential buyers saw it, is listed below. Words in quotation marks indicate illustrations. The pages are numbered as listed, indicating their place in the forthcoming book.

Every page can be accessed separately -- or you can tour sixteen pages chosen to represent the whole (these are the pages marked on the list below with asterisks). There are three different ways to "tour" them. The first allows you to "turn" the pages at your own pace, and to move backward or forward through the prospectus. If you take either of the two "auto-tours," the pages will "flip" forward automatically. The small page version takes under two minutes; the larger page version takes just over three.
TAKE 16-PAGE TOUR
TAKE LARGE-PAGE
AUTO-TOUR
TAKE SMALL-PAGE
AUTO-TOUR
Page by Page:

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