The crowd of office workers and salespeople were very quiet when the Saturn blasted off. They had turned on the black-and-white Japanese television set only seconds before the countdown gave up, and there wasn't much feeling of tension-is there anyone in the whole country who has not been jaded by a series of manned launchings?

And they watched only the first few seconds of the flight, each of them getting their hundred dollars' worth in a hurry, before they drifted back to work. If their breasts swelled, you couldn't see it. But neither did they moan that the space program was stealing food from their mouths, or aiding in the drain of capital from the inner city.

Far from it. These people were growing wealthy, a little, from the space program from the first American on the moon. One or two of them were even making enough money to send their kids to Harvard, had they wanted them to go, had they been able to get in.

The space race, like heart transplants and war, is good for the encyclopedia business, and these people were in the encyclopedia business. A big selling point of the Collier's Encycpedia these folks sold is that the 24 volume set includes complete schematic diagrams of the moon flight (not to mention Czechoslovakian street fighting photos). So the Colliermen liked the moonshot, the way businessmen were once rumored to like the War, and the Colliermen went out to sell that day with especial eagerness-all but one, and he was a spy.

Moonshots are good for the newspaper business, too. But moonshots are not a dime a dozen, and one of the newspapers in the city was planning ahead. An expose of Collier's Encyclopedia sales, as well as being a "genuine public service," would be good for the newspaper business, the newspaper thought. although not so good as a moonshot. So they sent a spy after Collier's.

And in the newspaper office, everybody got to watch the launch on six huge American color televisions, and the spy was pretty pissed off that he had to watch it in black-and-white.

"Hello, my name is ... I'm completing some combined opinion work in the area. But I am required to speak to both you and your wife. Is she in?"

It's very muggy in the Ohio Valley on summer evenings. A person either sits in his living room and swelters from the heat or sits in his air-conditioned living room and sniffles from his luxury. In either case, he is not delighted to have a college-age kid, smiling sincerely but dripping with sweat, cluttering his front porch and ringing his doorbell.

Some of those people manage to send the kid away in a hurry, often with truly marvelous excuses, but sometimes the vestiges of civility in our culture soften them up enough that they listen past the "is she in?" Sometimes they listen far enough to hear that they can get a set of Collier's Encyclopedia for free, and then, sometimes, their cars perk up.

Door-to-door salesmen for Collier's have vigorously claimed for years that they are not selling anything. The salesman's pitch is that his company is willing to give away an encyclopedia valued at $559 in exchange for a testimonial letter to be used "in future sales drives."

Like all Collier's salesmen, I memorized that sales pitch, all fifteen minutes of it, when I spent four days in training and two days on the job as an "advertising representative" for Collier's-all the while working undercover as a reporter for the Louisville Times.

Collier's is a respected encyclopedia, recommended by authorities and used by many schools-among them Harvard. The las time you cribbed from an encyclopedia in Lamont for a last minute paper, Collier's may have been your baby.

The problem is in the selling. The company's use of a "give-away" offer to sell its product has caused many complaints from customers and agencies.

In February, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ordered P. F. Collier, Inc., to stop its "lengthy and blatant use of deception" in selling the encyclopedia. The FTC had studied the case for-nine years before making its decision.

Collier's has appealed the case to the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington and while the court action proceeds, the FTC ruling is not in force. The penalty for disobeying the FTC order, if the order is upheld by the courts, would be a fine of up to $5,000 for each violation.