Summer (or Autumn?) Reading

When I first started covering this business back in 1986, I didn’t know what a catalog was — seriously. At least, not the kind we talk about from cover to cover in this magazine.

My parents never received any catalogs in the mail in the Long Island suburb where I grew up, only store fliers. At least, I never saw any catalogs. And although later in life we’ve all become big catalog shoppers, we were strictly a retail-shopping family back in those days.