Shopping Around

Abstract

American consumers are reported to constitute the world’s largest body of mail-order shoppers.1 In no other society it is said, are people so taken with the convenience of shopping at home as they are in this country. The mails regularly bring stacks of solicited and unsolicited catalogues offering everything from socket wrenches and calculators to doggie nests and firewood. And what the catalogues overlook, the avid consumer can probably find on one or another of the cable television shopping networks.

A glance at Pollard and Ehrman reminds us of the intimate link between the invention of printing and the proliferation . . .