Tilden Arms Hotel - 179 W Wantage Street
A decent hotel charging $4.00 and up a night for room and bath and handy to the train station. It is four stories high, so to conserve heat in the winter and preserve order in the summer, the manager has locked all the fire escapes.
Staying here is Curtis Sloan, aged 55, a representative of the Canadian-American Encyclopedia Company. Responsible for a region covering northern Massachusetts and southern Vermont and New Hampshire, Mr. Sloan is a frequent visitor to the cities of the area (save perhaps Sethwich). He will typically set up shop in a hotel and spend up to a week making sales calls on likely customers, and, if sales have been poor, cold selling door to door.
Mr. Sloan can be charitably called plain, with a thin face and slightly disproportionate ears and nose. His eyes are small and watery, framed by a pair of circular eyeglasses that suggest his vision is quite poor (though in fact, all his senses, are slightly better than human normal). He wears inexpensive, careworn suits and carries a battered but sturdy pair of bags, one for paperwork, the other with book samples (along with lockpicks, notebooks full of curious short-hand notes, and other weird sundries as needed).
Sloan is a nervous little man who alternates between bursts of gregarious patter when selling his encyclopedias, reference books, atlases, practical guides and the like and clipped, one word answers when asked to speak on topics outside of his wares or the weather. He is a passable salesman, eager and helpful to a point. In conversation his unblinking direct eye contact is only slightly less off-putting than his quietly mumbled affirmative “yes” while listening to others. He seems to subsist on a diet of hot black coffee, cheese sandwiches, and the hard candies that fill his pockets.
Type
Hospitality, Hotel
Parent Location
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