How-I-Did-It: Short Stories of Lamp Sales told by Salesmen to Salesmen

Originally published by the Westinghouse Lamp Company in 1918, this edition includes a prologue by Brian K. Johnson, which is excerpted here: "This is not a book about murder or other crimes, I need to make this plain at the beginning of this preface. That is what I thought when first I discovered it (more about this later), that this just might be a how-to manual for criminals. Unless you consider the act of spreading light across America a crime—some environmentalists point to modern light pollution as being responsible for the death of 900 billion birds in the country every year. Of course, this could be one of those books where the author has confessed his crime in an elaborate code. It is sort of a visceral title, isn’t it? Anyway, so here we have it: How-I-Did-It: Stories of Lamp Sales as told by Salesmen to Salesmen, Volume Two, Sept. 1917-1918. It is interesting that the title includes the dashes, and that in the subtitle, the “by” and “to” are italicized for emphasis. Gotta love those typographic nuances! In the early days of electricity, there was apparently a certain type of company that would employ a lamp salesman, who would come around to your farm or business and tell you that you were doing it all wrong: you should stop using gas or tallow candles or whatever to stay up past your bedtime. Instead, you should use this nifty lightbulb that we sell. No wiring? We’ll do it for you. Got a problem with existing wiring? Not an issue, we will rewire it for you, and eventually someone will have to rip out that wiring and replace it all, but you are probably good for fifty years or so with this wire, anyway. Looking back at 1918 and think of what all was happening then! A war! Possibly, sometime around then—I have never been a good student of history but I am relatively certain that either World War I was about to begin or perhaps even in full blossom. Of course they didn’t call it World War I, then, it was just the Great War, and really, few people thought it was so great. Certainly not the soldiers or the civilian casualties. The electric light had been available for a while, maybe since the 1870s, yet everyone in the country was not yet using electricity for basic illumination. It was thought insane to build a house with one outlet in each room. Why on earth would you need to have electricity in the living room? Apparently it was a difficult sell, so the Westinghouse Company thought it prudent to publish inspirational literature about how-to-do-it. Each issue featured the winner of a competition, paying out a whopping $15 for the lead story. (Certainly cheaper than hiring a copywriter, though some editing was invariably required.)" And so on... While the original work is in the public domain now, the fascinating prologue is copyrighted by BKJ Productions, LLC. And the afterword. And at least one of the stories inserted somewhere within.