Catalog: Fill & Download for Free

Sears.Beginning in the late 20th century, Sears had a catalog which allowed people to place orders remotely, without ever having to set foot in a Sears store. By the 1950s and 1960s, this catalog business was enormous, a significant chunk of the large retailer’s business, and so comprehensive that the Soviet Union was actually smuggling copies out of the US as soon as they could get them, so they knew everything necessary to run a modern economy.The catalog remained very important after that for decades, giving Sears a huge mail-order sales infrastructure to work with. Then the World Wide Web came along, and it didn’t take long for people to start offering an online retail experience, mailing customers products not only without ever setting foot in a store, but indeed with no store oftentimes existing at all.Sears was not among them. Despite already having a huge catalog business ready-made for this exact business model, and already being established as a leader for decades in the remote ordering business, Sears made no sincere effort at establishing an online retail presence for years on end.This ended calamitously for them, as the convenience of the web rapidly rendered their purely offline catalog obsolete. By the time they made their first fumbling forays onto the Internet, they were far behind.Today, Amazon is worth nearly $500 billion, and it’s a business that Sears not only could have been, it’s the business they absolutely should have been if they’d put the catalog online in a timely fashion.

Why was Princess Diana's ring dubbed the "Commoners Sapphire" and why was there controversy about her choice of ring as well as choosing it from a catalog?It's never been called “the Commoner's Sapphire”. Not then. Not now.It also wasn't chosen from a catalog. Garrard's, which has created/supplied jewelry to the Royal Family since 1843, sent a selection of rings. Diana chose the biggest, most ostentatious ring offered.There was no “controversy” about it. In the years that followed, haters chose to try and make a big deal out of the fact that Diana chose her own ring, rather than Charles choosing it, or them choosing it together, or the Queen giving Diana a family heirloom. But that only came up after the marriage broke down. At the time, it was barely mentioned.

Library Card CatalogsThe card catalog was the first stop on many a library outing. I remember the first time I encountered the card catalog at Berkeley's Doe Library. Oh my, the thing was huge, it just went on and on.I rather liked flipping through the cards on my way to finding the card I wanted. On some cards there were notes that the librarians had added.Card catalogs were a staple of anyone who grew up prior to computers. Computerized catalogs took over in the 1980's. Card catalogs came in different flavors, but generally there were: author, title, and subject files.In bigger libraries, the card catalogs had entire rooms devoted to them.The card catalog at Yale University's Sterling Memorial Library .Each of the hundreds and hundreds of drawers held hundreds and hundred of cards. There was quite a bit of information on these cards.I still recall the sound of the drawer being slid back in place. The slight release of air and the thud.