Who Was Home (2026)

A brown imitation-leather memorandum book, five inches by eight, turned up in a cardboard box at an estate sale outside Ava, Missouri, this summer. Inside the front cover, in pencil: Harlan Coble, 1962. He sold encyclopedia sets door to door in Douglas County for thirty-five years, out of the trunk of a car. The columns are ruled by hand — date, road, family, home, down, monthly — and the last one has no heading at all. Five entries are read here, in order, from October 1963 to September 1997.

The trade has a documented shape. World Book sold sets door to door through more than forty thousand salespeople at its height; by 2012 that force was ninety-five people, selling to schools and libraries 1. Britannica's set commanded $1,500 to $2,000 in the early 1990s, of which printing cost about $250 and the salesman's commission $500 to $600 2. In 1989, the industry's own people told the Washington Post that door-to-door selling had petered out by the end of the 1970s, because nobody was home in the daytime anymore 3. The Federal Trade Commission's Cooling-Off Rule, in force since 1972, gave buyers three business days to cancel a door-to-door sale over $25 4.

The county changed under the work. Douglas County counted 12,638 people in 1950, 9,653 in 1960, and 9,268 in 1970, its lowest figure of the century 5; the one-room schools of the Missouri Ozarks were consolidated with town districts around the end of the 1950s 6. Then the books themselves changed. Microsoft released Encarta on CD-ROM in March 1993 at nearly $400, then sold it for $99 and gave it away with Windows 7. Britannica's book sales halved in three years, and in 1996 the company laid off its entire remaining sales force in the United States and Canada 8. Its last print set was produced in 2010, and printing stopped altogether in 2012 1.

Note: the notebook and all persons described are fictional, created in the tradition of found-object storytelling. The county, its roads, and the shape of the encyclopedia trade are drawn from the public records linked above.