Eliph' Hewlitt sells Jarby's Encyclopaedia of Knowledge and Household Recipes door to door through the small towns of Iowa, and decides to marry a woman he has not met, using the encyclopaedia as his method. Butler wrote Pigs Is Pigs, a six-page joke that sold in the millions; this 1907 novel is Iowa itself - the depot, the store, the newspaper - and the book agent is a masterpiece. Fifty-five plates of river life, mountain views and red-roofed houses, among them Bingham and Bierstadt, carry the Iowa landscape of the book agent's travels.