Loading AI tools
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
Categories:
|
Side note: I grew up with this one: my dad was a VP at Crowell Collier Macmillan. And, no, I'm not the author of the article. -- Jmabel 06:45, Jul 21, 2004 (UTC)
So, I happen to know but can't cite from anywhere: Collier's Encyclopedia in its heyday relied heavily on door-to-door sales and the like. In the late 1960s, top encyclopedia salesmen earned more in a year than the company's executives. Then the U.S. government cracked down heavily on high-pressure sales tactics. For example, all large purchases had a three-day opt-out clause. Far worse than that for Collier's sales force, they actually were required by a court order to show all prospects a piece of paper that listed several high-pressure sales tactics the company had used in the past. Needless to say, sales fell off dramatically.
Does anyone have any idea where I might look for a citation for any of this? -- Jmabel | Talk 00:52, 15 October 2005 (UTC)
FTC cease and desist order found here: http://www.ftc.gov/os/decisions/docs/Vol%2070/ftcd-vol70(JULY-DECEMBER1966)PAGES977-1099.pdf (see esp p36 and 56). Other interesting stories can be found with search term "p f collier sales pitch" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.253.132.69 (talk) 13:25, 13 June 2013 (UTC)
I question the accuracy of the statement that this encyclopedia was first published in 1950-51, now that we have added articles from the 1921 edition to Wikisource. Eclecticology 18:01, 2005 Jan 10 (UTC)
I've tried to edit recent massive and mostly useful additions by User:HQCentral to be a little closer to Wikipedia style. The article has become a bit much of an essay, though a very informative one. - Jmabel | Talk 03:08, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
We now know that [User:HQCentral|HQCentral]] is the sockpuppet of a notorious plagiarizer. So Jmabel's concern about plagiarism was well-founded. -Will Beback 05:21, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
A set of Collier's appears in Rudy's (Cheech Marin) house in the movie Born in East L.A.
I am sitting beside a copy of Collier's which I purchased in the 1960's - here in the UK. The high-pressure sales mentioned above obtained here also. I find it still a worthwhile purchase, even though much is less current than it was. We also had the year-books for some five years afterwards, although they tended to be (unlike the encyclopaedias themselves) more US-oriented. I find the index of great value when checking to see if there are any places with similar names in the US/Canada to those in UK, but I do use them a great deal otherwise Peter Shearan 11:58, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
I've added a few {{fact}} tags as a start as this article makes many assertions with no inline references. Reads as probably true but has poor referencing. I see from the page history and the above that this is an ongoing issue - I think that there needs to be an understanding that, for wikipedia, a sentence reading XXX is YYY is unsupportable, in most cases, without a reliably sourced reference. Please leave the tags until someone finds the references - Peripitus (Talk) 12:28, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
I gather that HQCentral has now been characterized as a "serial plagiarizer" and his edits have all been reverted (not by me), so we are back to little more than a stub, as we were when he started working on this. I'm guessing that the three references he cited are nonetheless valid, if anyone wants to follow them up.
This was a great encyclopedia, but this is a terrible article. I'll try to help out. I mean I knew more before I started reading the article. Aaron Bowen 16:58, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.
Every time you click a link to Wikipedia, Wiktionary or Wikiquote in your browser's search results, it will show the modern Wikiwand interface.
Wikiwand extension is a five stars, simple, with minimum permission required to keep your browsing private, safe and transparent.