Early one morning in late March, a Greyhound bus pulled into the Tumbleweed Express cafe on the outskirts of Laramie, Wyo., after an 18-hour trip from Iowa City. Wes Caliger, a 69-year-old Heinecken & Associates Ltd. sales rep, disembarked and took a cab to the Grand Newsstand in downtown Laramie, where he shaved in the bathroom sink before sitting down to a sales call with store manager Mike Scott. Scott is also the buyer for Kent News in Scott's Bluff, Nebr., and six hours later he drove Caliger back to the bus station, where the decidedly old-school rep climbed on another bus for the long drive back to Iowa City. Both men pronounced the visit a success. Caliger called it an adventure.

"The airlines wanted to charge me $1,000 for a roundtrip to Laramie," Caliger told PW. "The Greyhound was $118, so it was really a no-brainer. I wasn't about to drive all the way out there to Laramie at the tail end of winter, so I went on down to the handy-dandy bus station and bought my ticket."

Scott was incredulous--and impressed. "I don't get many visits out here in Laramie, so it was pretty great," he said. "Wes has an old-fashioned approach that's disappearing from the world. I've got reps in Denver who won't drive 100 miles to see me. We managed to accomplish a lot in those six hours, and worked out the final details in the parking lot at the Tumbleweed Express. It was really a tremendous experience. It makes such a huge difference to have somebody actually sit down with you to walk you through the stuff."

"This was certainly something new for me," admitted Caliger, who has been selling books since 1960, "but it was a great experience all around. I'm a firm believer that the first rule in selling is showing up, and we had a really successful visit. It was a fine time, and Laramie is a terrific little town."

Caliger spent his time on the long trip catching up on the Sunday New York Times and listening to Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon on tape, an appropriate selection, certainly, for the Greyhound experience. "It didn't take me long to master the art of sleeping sitting up," Caliger told PW. "I was envious of the really short people who could just curl up across two seats. By the time I got back on the bus for the trip home I was a little more savvy about seat positioning."

Jim Harris, the owner of Iowa City's Prairie Lights Books, has known Caliger for years and was not surprised by the story of the rep's long odyssey. "Wes is a very unusual guy," Harris said. "He's got that code of the road warrior--find that soft pocket of yearning for books and do whatever it takes to fill it. People like Wes nourish this business from the bottom up; they're the rainwater."

Caliger had such a good time that he swears he wouldn't hesitate to do it again. "They've got a big rodeo up there in July," he said. "So I've kind of got my eye on that. I have to have something a little bit different in my life from time to time, and this certainly fit the bill. Obviously, the first thing I did when I got home was to jump in the shower."