Sears Roebuck tells us one story As this emporium, incorporated in 1893, spread outward from Chicago, MI, its illustrated catalogs became a mass medium of consumption in rural areas, outlying towns and among individual households of the working and lowermiddle classes. By 1895 the catalog reached 532 pages, offering dry goods as well as hardware, appliances and even pre-fabricated housing. Sears, like J.C. Penney’s and Montgomery Wards, overcame dislocations in space to unify America as a nation of consumers. Yet, by the 1950s, sales by mail and through order centers competed with their own department stores, especially as they anchored malls supplying suburban home-owners. Later, these companies themselves, built on mass marketing and economies of scale, faced competition from warehouse and discount sales, leading to crises for all these retailers. Restructuring to define their consumption niches, Sears and Penney’s let their catalogs die in the 1990s.

Meanwhile, another story of catalogs took shape around American mobility in the upper middle class. Department stores like Dallas’ Neiman-Marcus and specialty entrepreneurs such as L.L. Bean and Eddie Bauer in outdoor clothing appealed to more sophisticated clients who were not outside American consumption, but dispersed through it. Book-of-the-Month clubs and spin-offs reinforced associations of culture and distribution of goods within imagined “communities.” Through the 1970s and 1980s, this upscale marketing by mail exploded, combining glossy pictures and stylized captioning, ready telephone access, credit-card purchasing and targeted mailing. These catalogs responded to diverse upscale neighborhoods where aspirations differed from household to household. Moreover, they responded to new dislocations in time in two-career households where 24-hour accessibility from home facilitated consumption as an interstitial activity Thousands of catalogs today seem to reflect American diversity Some transcend their connections with mall retailers. Neiman Marcus’ Christmas extravaganza has become a regular news feature, while Victoria’s Secret has become a part of American dialogues of heterosexual romance and sensuality including a television spin-off, Veronica’s Closet (1997–). Another catalog, based on the adventures of a fictional J. Peterman, became a regular feature of the long-running sitcom Seinfeld. Catalogs also transform geography: L.L. Bean has turned its Maine home-town into a mercantile center, and museums extend their recognition and support through sales of high cultural artifacts. Others create different imagined communities: National Public Radio offers culture with an attitude, from T-shirts to video collections. These catalogs nonetheless accumulate in mailboxes and on coffee tables with other catalogs that reinforce consumptive identities (Marlboro cigarette gear or a Mercedes-Benz owner’s catalog), ethnicity or even life cycles—birth is greeted in middle-class zip codes by catalogs offering advice, products and status insecurity about the baby’s “right start.” Clothes, gifts, art and food all have been depicted, described and distributed in a booming industry that reminds Americans of what is missing in the midst of affluence.

Yet, through barriers of access and credit, these sales also reinforce divisions within American life—mailings by zip code and usage constantly divide potential customers from those outside specialized consumer worlds. Television sales networks prove more inclusive, while stressing the same features of visual imagery and descriptions that identify the consumer as well as the product: one is told who one will be as a consumer and how to show off products as well as use them. Internet sales and virtual catalogs also compete for the higher-end consumer, with an immediate responsiveness (to questions and targeting) that mail cannot offer, advancing some Americans from a world of malls into a world as a virtual mall in which potential products are always at hand; for example, historic Sears once again offers long-distance sales through its web-site.

Through mass media and the Internet, moreover, this historically American pattern can be reinterpreted more easily on a global scale, threatening to leave the catalog as a final relic of the age of print.