By the age of 70, most traveling salesmen have retired—or at least wish they had. Not Wes Caliger. The Midwestern sales rep for Heinecken & Associates is no Willy Loman; his favorite books are the novels of Philip Roth and John Updike's Bech series, titles that feature robust men of a mature age living life pretty much as they please. With 42 years of experience as a "book traveler," a phrase he recalls fondly from his early years selling books, Caliger doesn't plan to quit anytime soon.
Caliger's territory for Heinecken, one of the largest commission sales groups in the Midwest, covers a chunk of that region centered on Iowa City, Iowa, and includes stores as far away as Ohio, Kansas and Wisconsin. His accounts range from the tiny Paper Moon in McGregor, Iowa, to Follett College Stores (numbering some 400-plus) outside Chicago. The presses Caliger sells are equally diverse and include his "big three"—Houghton Mifflin, Workman and Harcourt—as well another 30 smaller publishers, such as Sourcebooks, the Mountaineers and Holiday House.
Caliger, who admires the movies of Jack Nicholson, has some of the rugged, good looks of a Hollywood cowboy, complete with a slight swagger and a thick white mustache. He's got charisma, and it's easy to see why booksellers look forward to their appointments with him. He's got manners, too: when PW flies into Cedar Rapids, Iowa, late on a Saturday in March, Caliger offers to make the half-hour drive to pick him up and then, almost first thing, takes him out to a bar—the Sanctuary—for a drink and dinner.
This is just the start of three days that will include a thorough tour of Iowa City, where Caliger has been based for more than 20 years. Iowa City is a good place for a book sales rep: it's a college town with a formidable literary reputation, the kind of place where one can randomly fling a poetry book into one of the numerous local coffee shops and hit half a dozen serious writers. Among the local attractions are the writing programs run by the University of Iowa, including the International Writing Workshop, which brings in 20 to 30 foreign writers for a term, a nonfiction graduate writing program, a journalism program and the Iowa Writers Workshop itself, which mints 60 new poets and fiction writers annually, many of whom stick around town for a couple of years while polishing their manuscripts. The number of students, coupled with the teachers at the Iowa Writers Workshop (who this year include Frank Conroy, Joy Williams and Ethan Canin) and published university professors, such as neurologist Antonio Damasio and journalist Stephen Bloom, means writers are as thick on the ground as the covering of snow that falls on the city the day after PW arrives. One is even likely to encounter writers in the air: on the small commuter flight from Minneapolis, PW sat between a pair of recent graduates of the Writer's Workshop, both returning for a quick visit.
Locals describe Iowa City as a "cultural oasis" in a landscape of corn and soy. Over the past quarter century, one bookstore with a national reputation has fed this oasis: Prairie Lights. Founded by Jim Harris in 1978, it celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. This is one of Caliger's principal accounts, and the store is best known for its weekly series of author readings, Live from Prairie Lights, broadcast on local NPR stations. Other sizable local bookstores include Iowa Book—in a strip mall right behind Prairie Lights, it's the oldest independent store in town, having been founded in 1944—and the University of Iowa Bookstore.
Caliger has been Jim Harris's sales rep from the start, and he pushed for Caliger's nomination as Rep of the Year. Sitting down to a coffee at the cafe in Prairie Lights, Harris, a big, bearded guy with a personality to match, enjoys the opportunity to sing Caliger's praises in front of him: "Author signings, problems with returns, co-op advertising, window display contests—he handles all these issues, handles them quickly and efficiently," Harris tells PW. Showing sound discretion, Harris later adds in an e-mail, "Wes is just plain fun, and he knows what's going on. Other reps don't."
40 Years and Counting
If wisdom is the byproduct of experience, then Caliger has a distinct advantage over the run-of-the-mill sales rep. After graduating from Drake University in 1959, interrupted by a stint in Korea as an enlisted Marine, Caliger joined Meredith Press while living in Des Moines, Iowa, and started a peripatetic career. He sold for Meredith in Indianapolis and then Boston in 1962, before becoming a sales manager and getting posted to New York City in 1964. There he commuted from Westchester and spent nights drinking in Greenwich Village. Caliger joked that he started by selling cookbooks. "At first," says Caliger, "Meredith had a dozen cookbooks. But then things got exciting when they added the American Heritage Dictionary and the Encyclopedia Britannica." All kidding aside, cookbooks were good to Caliger: he once had a single order for 42,500 units from Modern Book, a distributor in Boston.
In 1965, Children's Press moved Caliger Chicago, where he remained until 1968. Then he returned to New York City as trade and educational sales manager for Parents' Magazine Press. His early exposure to a variety of publishing, particularly in children's books, benefits Caliger to this day. Pete Cowdin of Reading Reptile in Kansas City, Mo., praised Caliger's knowledge of children's and YA literature as well as his salesmanship. "This guy could sell pajamas to a sea otter, yet he's the Gandhi of traveling salesmen," said Cowdin.
Looking back on his long career, Caliger laughs, recalling how much things have changed. "When I was at Parent's Magazine Press, our office was on Vanderbilt Avenue and back then, helicopters used to land on the top of the Pan Am Building," now the Met Life Building. He also laughs at some of the more offbeat products he was responsible for selling: "In Indianapolis, I was repping for Better Homes and Gardens, who then had a model home program," he says. "Part of my job was going to the local contractors and convincing them to have their work featured in regional editions of the magazine." Another time, he was selling Hammond Globes, samples of which were contained in "big square blue plastic carrying cases." Caliger was expected to lug them in and out of department stores, such as Wanamaker's in Philadelphia, Bon Marche in New Orleans and Rich's in Atlanta, that dominated the market at the time. Fortunately for Caliger, this was an era when car trunks were significantly larger than they are today.
After eight years of managing independent reps for Parents' Magazine Press, Caliger returned to Chicago in 1973, where, with a born-again Christian named Dana Sullivan, he started an independent rep group called Genesis Marketing. "We tried to go down both sides of the street," says Caliger, "and represented some secular publishers, and some religious ones. It didn't work." The partnership lasted only two years, after which Caliger joined another two-man company, John Hutchens and Lou Livengood. The three worked under the trade name of Midwest Book Travelers, selling such lines as Celestial Arts. Then, serendipity stepped in. "I'm just three months older than Ted [Heinecken, owner of Heinecken & Associates]," says Caliger, "and we were friends who played tennis on the weekends. One day I proposed that we meet for lunch." Less than a year later, in January 1981, after Hutchens left the group, Livengood and Caliger "blended" their rep group with Heinecken & Associates.
Give Me a Heinecken
Heinecken & Associates covers 14 Midwestern states from its home base in Chicago: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Ohio, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
Heinecken & Associates has had longstanding relationships with many of the publishers it represents, such as Workman and Houghton Mifflin. As consolidation began to take a toll on the number of sales reps in the field, more and more publishers relied on Heinecken to take responsibility for reaching out to smaller or remote customers. Among clients who joined in the early 1980s are Collector Books, Facts on File/ Checkmark, Harcourt, Holiday House and Meredith. Later in the '80s, their ranks were swelled by Accord, Albert Whitman, Fulcrum, Globe Pequot, Hunter, the Mountaineers, U.S. Games and Voyageur. More recently, Gibbs Smith, Mountain, Peachtree and Soundprints are also being sold by Heinecken.
The group's Web site (www.heinecken.com) explains its philosophy: "Crucial to [our] effectiveness is our conviction that being a part of the 'community of books' is a special calling, requiring a love of reading and belief in the printed word as a keystone of our culture. Our particular role has us performing a variety of tasks such as troubleshooting for our accounts, consulting with publishers on book projects, aiding in the set-up of effective co-op advertising and in-store marketing, participating fully in regional trade organizations, etc., etc., and constantly working to improve our efficacy in all of these endeavors."
As one might expect, Caliger's own philosophy of sales is similar to that of Heinecken's. He wrote in his Rep of the Year application that what helps him stand apart from other reps is his attention to detail. In an incident that occurred early in his career, Caliger recalls, "Observing my lack of product knowledge, [a buyer] insisted that I should know more than I did, so she could make better buying decisions. That would work better for both of us—sell through, followed by reorders. The axiom sunk in." Caliger says that the range of information about books now available to booksellers can be "overwhelming," and it's part of his job to sift through and highlight what booksellers need in their store, instead of what they or even the publishers may think they want in their store.
Matt Lage, buyer at Iowa Book, tells PW, "A lot of group reps have a lot of lines. Many of them blow off certain lines, but Wes pays attention to every one. It could be Workman, it could be Fulcrum. Certain houses have 'make-books' that they want to get in every store and they only focus on those. Wes doesn't do that. If there's a book in the catalogue he thinks you'll need, it will be marked. This can be a little disconcerting for the buyer, but if you're the publisher, that's what you want."
Despite coming from a generation born well before the revolution in personal computing, Caliger has honed his technique to suit the times. One of Caliger's sons helped build Heinecken's Web site and has set up a modest, up-to-date office for Caliger at his townhouse, which makes him available most hours of the day via voice, fax or e-mail. Despite the preponderance of e-mail, Caliger is steadfast about what is most important to him: his copier. "This is the best thing I ever bought for my business," he says, caressing a small personal copier that sits atop some low file drawers. "There's still tons of paperwork—orders, catalogues—that need to be duplicated and distributed to numerous people." Surprisingly, his office is free of catalogues and galleys. Instead, these are spread in judicious piles throughout his house. Boxes of books are stacked up in the garage, and a dark basement room, just a couple of lightbulbs dangle from the ceiling, is lined with raw pine shelves and three years' worth of sales materials.
His living room displays multiple montages of photos featuring his four children and nine grandchildren from three marriages. Iron garden furniture does double duty as a kitchen set. The table is covered with whatever work has the highest priority at the moment; conspicuously, a BB gun is lying on the floor, weighing down yet another pile of publisher catalogues. There's no TV in sight. "It's funny," says Caliger, "but Meredith has this bestseller about the TV show Trading Spaces—where designers come to redo a couple of rooms in your house. Well, I'd never seen the show, but just as soon as I mentioned the book to my daughter, she went wild, talking about how it was her favorite." Now, Caliger will have a Trading Spaces (or more accurately, the sister Learning Channel show, While You Were Out) experience firsthand: his youngest daughter has announced her plan to redecorate his basement when he is away on some future sales trip.
Survivor
Though Caliger has spent much of the last 20 years based at home in Iowa City, he's developed a reputation for putting his own comfort aside and traveling long distances to call on even the tiniest bookstore. Once Caliger rode a Greyhound bus to visit an account in Wyoming—the trip was just short of 1,000 miles each way. Driving through blizzards has become routine as he crisscrosses his territory. Having been on the road for more than 40 years—routinely putting 15,000 miles or more on a car per year and flying many thousands more—he can recall only a couple of dangerous moments. Once, in 1961, Caliger was in a head-on collision near Vincennes, Ind. "The oncoming driver made an illegal pass and I got him, but in a low impact way," says Caliger. Neither driver was hurt, but both vehicles were wrecked. Caliger has even been known to enlist the help of a pilot buddy who owns a twin-engine plane to help him visit accounts, though this has been somewhat curtailed since the September 11 terrorist attacks.
While some people have become fearful of flying since September 11, Caliger remains undaunted, having himself survived a plane crash. On July 23, 1965 (Caliger remembers the exact date), he was aboard Allegheny 604, a Convair 340/440, when an engine failed shortly after takeoff, approximately five miles east-northeast of the Williamsport—Lycoming County airport in Pennsylvania. Although no one died, the 35 passengers and three crew were sent to the local hospital with burns and bruises. "We thought the pilot, whose leg was broken, was a hero for planting us so softly in a small clearing," says Caliger, "but the FAA was not so kind and cited the crew for 'failure to implement proper procedures for an engine failure on takeoff.' "
One more example that Caliger is a survivor: In a business that has left a lot of salespeople looking for work in recent years, he has managed to stay in tune with the times and in touch with his customers' needs.
Iowa Book's Lage sums up Caliger best when he tells PW that five years ago, after Caliger went into the hospital for medical treatment, some area reps were waiting for Wes to retire, so they could cherry pick his clients. "If I were those vultures," says Lage, "I wouldn't be holding my breath."
