America’s traveling salesman humor is a genre unto itself, in that it is both utilitarian and entertaining, filling literally dozens of turn-of-the-century pamphlets and books. The jokes and the news he carried were a way for the salesman to ingratiate himself to the customer. Salesmen jokes tell us a lot about these knights (and ladies) of the road, as well as a lot about ourselves and changing mores. This 200 years-worth of humor has been gathered from the stacks of the Library of Congress, Smithsonian, and Chicago’s Newberry Library.