Reviews of Store Catalogs

by Johannah King-Slutzky

The J. Peterman Company: Owner’s Manual No. 121
By John Peterman
The J. Peterman Company, 74 pp., $0.00

Not long ago, I spent an afternoon in a sparsely populated cafe on the bank of the Seine with an older gentleman, an Ernest Hemingway-type in rolled-up sleeves. His chief claim to fame was that he’d successfully wooed Audrey and Marilyn in the 1960s, but while the glamor of his private life eclipsed his public travails, he’d been busying accomplishing more than his fair share of success in life — -or should I say exactly his fair share; when you meet the man it becomes immediately clear that he runs on only a dash of luck generously greased by a certain European charm and personality — -and today his résumé includes climbing Mount Everest wearing only a motorcycle jacket and adopting a coterie of displaced polar bears from southern Alaska, which he raised as his own children. We’d been talking for three hours before I realized I wasn’t in a weathered cafe off the Seine at all: I was in a small room in my own home — -my bathroom — -reading a J. Peterman catalog.

Nearly thirty years after its initial publication in 1987, the J. Peterman Catalog is as winning and ebullient as ever, though with its 121st issue comes the nostalgia specific to age. Like previous issues, the catalog is divided into two or three vignettes per page, each accompanied by an illustration of the item for sale, among which include men’s and women’s clothing, leather accessories, flasks and thermoses, and specialty kitchenware.

Peterman pulls off wistful without becoming bitter, as, for example, in his story about the Italian khakis he lusted after at twenty-five, wondering, “Why waste such classic vintage style on the old?” (With typical flair, J. Peterman’s response is half mysterious, half self-congratulatory: “Well, now I know.”)

Critics have long charged Mr. Peterman with self-indulgence, the most famous riff being none other than the 1990s NBC hit, Seinfeld, in whose “Jacopo Peterman,” played by John O’Hurley, the real-life John “J.” Peterman found an unlikely mirror. The charge is not without cause. On the opposite page from the vignette about the khakis J. Peterman thrusts his catalog into a self-conversant mise en abyme when he describes his glee at finding an old J. Peterman blazer on an Italian-residing Frenchman (“Henri”) with whom he has been trapped in an elevator:

We finally met on San Pietro’s elevator as it made its way down the 150-foot cliff to the beach. He was wearing this classic blazer, khakis, and no shoes, carrying hardbound versions of Fathers and Sons and The China Study.

I thought to myself, hmm.

“Where’d you get the blazer?”

“Oh, this,” he says with a heavy French accent. “Had it for 25 years, bought it from a little place in the States… you wouldn’t have heard of it.”

“Try me.”

“J. Peterman.”

We became fast friends.

Is the Fall 2014 issue of the J. Peterman catalog indulgent? Yes. Not only Italian Frenchman, Turgenev novels, and the finest pleated khakis, but also “the most flattering dress of the 20th century” (“Women looked wonderful in it. Still do. And always will”), polyglot bistros, goat willow timber for campfire, and even a button-down shirt Thomas Jefferson would have endorsed — — like agriculture, it isn’t stuffy, you see — -populate this tour de force of Euro-American fetishism. But unlike J. Peterman’s more popular imitators, including the Urban Outfitters catalog and Pottery Barn’s monthly mailer, Peterman’s consumerist offerings are always transcribed with pitch perfect gusto.

Recommended reading for trains and toilets. Starred review.

Cutco: The World’s Finest Cutlery. Annual Sale Book 2014
By CUTCO Corporation
CUTCO Corporation, 15 pp., $0.00

The Cutco 2014 Annual Sale Book’s promise is lifestyle, one that can be chopped, cubed, diced, spread or julienned, with specialty goods ranging from knives to scissors to serrated spatula spreader. That’s a shame, because unlike other lifestyle publications, such as Martha Stewart Living, the Cutco catalog’s vision suffers from over-specificity without depth.

Although it would be unorthodox, perhaps the Cutco catalog is best filed as magical realism. The allusion to a “perfect breakfast” — -here depicted as an arrangement of plate-free Belgian waffles, maple syrup and walnuts beguilingly smeared across the white marble countertop (p. 5) — -reads more like middle class pulp fiction than fantasy. The plain simplicity of goods for sale compensates for some of the Cutco catalog’s realist losses: knives are for purchase in black, pearl, and red, and in variety sets like “Homemaker” and “Tableknife.” The book’s glossy stock photos against marble and stained wood backdrops (the only two backgrounds photographed here) are alluring but disappoint upon examination. Suspense is almost completely sanitized from this world, where even items like “Pizza Cutter” and “Ice Cream Scoop” are titled as generically as possible without even seasonal emotional cues. (I did find one barrel of apples in a bottom page corner.)

If the Cutco catalog has any hangups, they’ve been bleached away. Only one neurosis persists — the Cutco catalog’s love of tidiness, in which captions like “Rests on handle to keep counters clean” and “Comes apart for easy cleaning” blur together into an all-too-common refrain.

Recommended only for post-cereal box reading.

Hammacher Schlemmer: Holiday Supplement 2014
By Hammacher Schlemmer Operations Center, Forward by John R. MacArthur
Hammacher Schlemmer, 79 pp., $0.00

As the cover proudly boasts, Hammacher is 166 years old, a fact with which this catalog struggles to wrap its head around as it attempts, like the rest of its boomer-targeted cohort, to find age-appropriate footing. Is Hammacher Schlemmer consumerist bildungsroman? What, for instance, should we make of alcoholic toys like “The Covert Aeronautical Cocktail Shaker,” a plated nickel model airplane physically not dissimilar to the heat-softened wax in a lava lamp — -H.S. calls the piece “art-deco” — -whose fuselage will make easy work of martinis shaken, not stirred?

Hammacher Schlemmer is not a tedious mail order book, but anxiety about age, memory, and bodily integrity are strong undercurrents in what only appears to be a simple tale of novelty goods. As early as the first ten pages Hammacher Schlemmer introduces a skeumorphotic “iPhone Snoozer” alarm clock (your smartphone slides right into a more conventional rectangular block for uncomplicated dozing), the first of many easy-does-it technology converting devices. Others include “The Super 8 to Digital Video Converter” and the “LP and Cassette to CD/Digital Converter” as well as a bevy of memory expanding or digital-memory simplifying devices. Similarly, the threat of bodily harm is always looming: though the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog lulls, it also predicts automobile accidents, germy shower curtains, long falls from house fires, home invasion, and tens of ways to develop foot and lower back problems ranging from poor circulation to plantar fasciitis. Even the busy layout, which features four tightly-kerned blurbs to a page and accompanying photographs in non-standard sizes, feels buzzy and distracted. But then you turn to p. 16, “The Darth Vader Toaster,” featuring “eyes that imply nefarious intent when its internal heating elements glow” and remember that whimsy and anxiety often co-develop in mail order catalogs of the highest intelligence.

If there is one place where Hammacher Schlemmer goes awry, it is the introduction of extraneous products, like quaternary figures in a novel, which pose more questions than they answer. Who would possibly use an inverted seven foot pre-lit PVC Christmas tree, balancing precariously on the point of its head? But then again, the best poetry, philosophy, and fiction often introduce new conditions of possibility. Where but here could one purchase an upside down Christmas tree, a down jacket that becomes a commuter’s neck pillow, or an acoustic guitar that doubles as a doorbell? The Hammacher Schlemmer catalog can appear distracted: does it yearn for prolonged adolescence, or mundane utilitarianism? Future issues of Hammacher Schlemmer way wish to channel the catalog’s capriciousness in more economical ways, or else tone down the footwear for plantar warts.

Recommended for most ages during Holiday season. Not recommended for men with poor impulse control ages 47–55. Starred review.

Johannah King-Slutzky is a blogger and essayist from New York City.