Chain Bookstores and Library Collection Building

About 20 years ago I was employed as a consultant by an educational publishing company. One of my chief duties was to spend a few days at least once each year in a number of pilot schools in which the company's textbooks were being used experimentally to determine just how much this particular publisher's books and educational programs raised reading scores, with the ultimate aim, of course, of using the results to sell more books and perhaps even pick up a statewide adoption or two. The 60 or so pilot schools were located all over the country, in both urban areas (Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Manhattan's Lower East Side, for example) and in such rural, “blue highway” towns as Minden, Louisiana, and Flensburg, Minnesota.