Word: encyclopedia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...teen-ager in rural Pennsylvania, far from the sea, Burt Webber had visions of finding long-lost treasure in sunken ships. First he took up scuba diving; later he embarked on a long trail of treasureless sea hunts, barely supporting his growing family as a peripatetic encyclopedia salesman and brickworker. But last November Webber's ship finally came in. Blessed by coincidence and new technology, the 36-year-old adventurer located the site of a 17th century Spanish galleon, the Concepción, some 80 miles north of the Dominican Republic. With his research partner, Jack Haskins...
...etiquette, has tripled in the past three years. Publishers are rushing books into print to rehabilitate Americans' behavior and bring order to their vast social confusion. Columnist Ann Landers, with her wonderfully brisk "listen-cookie" style, has just come forth with a 1,212-page The Ann Landers Encyclopedia A to Z (abdominal muscles to zoonoses), which gets down to all sorts of nitty-gritty not only about social rituals ("Prince Philip, may I present my laundress Ruth Smith") but also about bedwetting, inverted nipples and nose jobs. Charlotte Ford, Henry II's daughter, has a "book of modern manners...
Then came a sequence of "whiles"-a while as a door-to-door encyclopedia and Bible salesman, a while as a plumber's helper in Oregon, a while as a disc jockey in Fort Worth, and so on. Willie was forever setting off for new destinations with everything he could call his own loaded into his 1946 Ford: Martha, the three kids they soon had, some furniture and an "Oklahoma credit card" (a length of hose for siphoning gas from roadside tanks). A few years of this and Martha began heading for a destination of her own: divorce court...
...rock devotees and college crowd on its fringes. While his post-Nashville LPs began building a national following, he consolidated his local reputation by promoting a series of July 4th outdoor concerts featuring friends like Leon Russell and Kris Kristofferson-and, not incidentally, himself. "When I was in the encyclopedia business," Willie explains, "I learned that whatever you want to sell, first you've got to sell yourself...
Fascinated to discover what a Communist analysis had to say about the opium of the people these days, Hungarians snapped up The Small Encyclopedia's entire 78,000-copy press run well before book week ended, making the book one of the year's bestsellers...