Typical outfits included the order forms and other paraphernalia establishing and forwarding the business connection between the canvassing agent and his publisher-employer, plus, either integrally as part of a "canvassing book" or separately as a "sample book," a mini-version of the book being sold that had been specifically designed for an agent's show-and-tell—bearing, usually, the volume's title-page, table of contents, and most thrilling illustrations and "bits" (sometimes from proofs or early states), with standard and perhaps optional binding samples glued to the pastedowns. (Each entry in Arbour's main, alphabetical-by-author listing tells what is present in the volume described, including always a note on its binding, with the indices providing access by publisher, publication place, copyright holder, title, and language.) Also present might be "bound-in leaves of recommendations, advertisements, and conditions of sale, tipped-in sales speech slips, handbills, and broadside puffs, loosely inserted leaflets and pamphlets of sales advice, and leaves and chits of manuscript additions solicited by agents from their territories' influential citizens" (xi). Some canvassing books still contain the agents' manuscript subscription lists, telling who bought the books so enticingly flourished. Thus the outfits and Arbour's descriptions of them present a complex array of information found absolutely nowhere else about what 19th-century American book publishers thought they were doing, and for whom, and why they thought their "market" might actually want or be brought to want what they were selling.

Moreover, the books canvassers offered were of the sort that by and large did not "make" Wright and BAL and so are themselves understudied—yet they are what millions of Americans read and wanted to read; they are books they were proud to own. The cliché assuming Victorians' fascinated, reverential curiosity about Great Men is supported: Titles beginning Life, Lives, or Memoirs (135) outnumber all other such constellations; military giants, naval heroes, patriotic women, statesmen, and evangelists, along with notable villains, "hot" celebrities, and Queen Victoria herself all have their many volumes. Another 70 titles begin, History: American, sacred, or "world," the spectacle and sweep of history enchanted our ancestors. Listed are books in French, German, and Scandinavian languages as well as English. There are children's books, conduct books, song books, and Civil War reminiscences; lavishly illustrated works on newly knowable exotic peoples and places; books on floods, fires, earthquakes, tidal waves, and other sensational disasters; books on moral philosophy, the fine points of etiquette, and elocution; and books on health and home medicine for man, woman, child, and beast. There are romances, poetry, and joke books; fairy tales and cookbooks and books preaching temperance; books charting study courses on science, law, and the Bible; books on horse-training, how to make money, and "the American Negro in the Great World War." USA Today did not invent the convention of telling "us" what "we" think, do, or believe—52 titles begin, Our, e.g., Our Baby Darlings, Our Country in Peace and War, Our Faith and Its Defenders, Our Feathered Friends, Our Home Doctor, Our Islands and Their People; Our Martyred Presidents, Our Social Manual for All Occasions, Our Wild Indians, Our Wonderful Progress. Only five titles begin, My—and four of them are for children.

Arbour's introduction reminds us that canvassing agents' subscription sales represented the only way books got to many rural Americans, and that they were a surprisingly prominent source of books for urban Americans as well, especially in poor and ethnic communities where bookstores were few. The "demo" books he describes and the complete books they prefigured offer a rich lode to the whole variegated range of scholars mining American cultural history and values. For if Whitman had written, "I see America reading," these would have been the books he envisioned in its eager hands.