J.P. Johnston

Twenty Years of Hus'ling began as an afterthought. J. P. Johnston, born in 1852, had finished a trade manual called The Auctioneer's Guide when friends suggested he add a sketch of his own life to show that the advice worked; the sketch outgrew the book and was published separately, copyrighted in his own name in 1887. What it records is a run of ventures: raising sheep from a pet lamb, doing the hearing for a deaf cattle drover, a collapsed chicken deal, a wagonload of eggs destroyed, an arrest that cost him his last dollar, sheep pelts, a restaurant partnership, patent rights, and at last the auctioneer's stand. He tells the failures as fully as the wins, and dedicates the volume to the hus'lers of America. The edition still in circulation is the Thompson and Thomas printing from Chicago dated 1902, carrying forty-eight illustrations by W. W. Denslow, who had drawn L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz two years earlier. Outside his own pages, almost nothing about Johnston is on record.