On National Review Online Cathy Seipp offers a paean to the Internet's role in keeping out-of-print books in circulation.
No longer must we book geeks troll dusty old shops (mostly to no avail) for particular sentimental favorites. Several years ago I began to easily find most of McKenney's and Bracken's books online for just a few dollars each, along with those of another out-of-print author I'd often fruitlessly searched for, Judy Van Der Veer. Information about obscure and forgotten writers like Van Der Veer, whose atmospheric tales of ranch life in the San Diego backcountry have been described as "lyrically minimalist" by California state historian Kevin Starr, is another great gift from the Internet.
One Van Der Veer novel, November Grass, was recently reissued as part of Heyday Press's California Legacy Series. What I consider her best, though (because it's the only one with a real plot), is the 1966 children's classic Hold the Rein Free, about two ranch children who steal a thoroughbred mare from her heartless owner. It's still out of print but available used online for as little as a dollar or two, plus shipping. Even rereading this story as an adult I found it such a page-turner that I'm surprised it's never been optioned by Hollywood.
As prices get bid up, online auctions reveal just how much customers want out-of-print books. And that information has brought some once-lost books back into print. Tiny Purple House Press has flourished by bringing back old children's books. The press is named for Mr. Pine's Purple House, founder Jill Morgan's favorite book as a child.
Turns out the book was also Jeff Bezos's favorite, leading to an unexpected plug on an Amazon promotional email. "Within a day, the book's sales rank leapt from 50,000 to 15," report Beth Kwon and Maccabee Montandon in a Fortune Small Business feature. "'I was ecstatic,' says Morgan."
Recently reissued in a 40th anniversary edition, Mr. Pine's Purple House would make a fun gift for the nonconformist child in your life. As a child, I particularly enjoyed its characters' colorful surnames.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 29, 2005 • Comments
Why is Netflix so charming? asks satisfied customer Grant McCracken. His theory: It offers near-infinite choice and, hence, gives customers exactly what's right for them. But it also helps you manage those choices, "mediating plenty in a post-scarcity world."
With Netflix, I have access to just about all the movies in the world. But, given my subscription model, they come to me only 2 at a time.
Two movies are not a lot. In a world of nearly limitless access, this should be irksome. But it ain't, of course, because these are almost always exactly the movies that interest me. Two movies has a deeper virtue. "Two movies" is an elimination of all the movies that might otherwise bid for my attention, damaging my sense of value and, God knows, even my identity formation.
Grant's analysis adds another dimension to some of my thoughts on the challenges and opportunities presented by proliferating choices.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 29, 2005 • Comments
Carl Bialik, the WSJ's "Numbers Guy," sorts through dueling estimates of Thanksgiving weekend retail sales. (This link does not require a subscription.) The most obvious way to count sales--asking retailers--won't work, because many stores, notably Wal-Mart, won't say.
"As more and more retailers have given less and less information, you are in search of the Holy Grail, the statistic that will give you some insight," says Michael Niemira, chief economist and director of research for the International Council of Shopping Centers, a trade group based in New York. "No single statistic out there is totally comprehensive."...
"Hardly any companies comment on how they did on Black Friday," says Merrill Lynch analyst Stacy Turnof, who covers department stores. "It used to be like that years ago, that you called them Monday and they gave you information." Those large companies that have shared information have reported increases well below the 22% cited by NRF (the Online Journal has assembled updates in its Holiday-Sales News Tracker).
Without hard sales data, there's a lot of room for different estimates, using everything from credit card sales to online surveys to videos of mall crowds.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 29, 2005 • Comments
What makes fashion valuable? Business changes are forcing designers, merchants, and fashionistas to rethink their assumptions, as Julie Frederickson's posts discussed below, and the Black Friday blogging more generally, demonstrate. In the Boston Globe, Kate Jackson reports on how "cheap chic or disposable clothing" is changing fashion:
Cheap chic is not a new concept, but it's now more foolproof than ever, according to Aaron Keller, cofounder of Capsule, a brand development firm in Minneapolis. "Low-cost retailers are no longer a season behind," he said. "They're side by side with the designers."
Keller credits a combination of technology, overseas manufacturing, and the fierce competition that exists among discount retailers for faster production cycles and lower prices. "For instance, China is getting smarter about quality and product. A lot of retailers have been tapping into these and other countries where labor is cheaper," he said.
As a result, innovative design isn't the competitive advantage it once was. Also, since low-cost retailers such as Target, Wal-Mart, H&M, and Old Navy have such a large presence, they have the financial capital to negotiate for increasingly better quality, he said.
In other words, knockoffs don't look like knockoffs anymore.
Today, a shopper can buy a Marc Jacobs velvet beaded shrug for $440 at Saks or go to Old Navy and pick up a similar version for $26.50. "It may not be the most premium quality, but if it's a trendy piece that will be out of rotation in a few weeks, even the most moneyed shopper is going to choose the less expensive option," Keller said.
According to the Cotton Incorporated Lifestyle Monitor newsletter, 58 percent of women surveyed said they're more likely to shop the apparel department at Target today than they were two years ago, citing better styles and low prices.
In TSOS, I define fashion as aesthetic changes purely for their own sake, without underlying functional reasons. (You could broaden that definition to change for change's sake.) Fashion in this sense isn't limited to personal appearance. So, for instance, baby names go through fashion cycles, even though there's no commercial market for them.
The "fashion industries" traditionally bundle several different values together in their goods. One is freshness, novelty, or trendiness. Suddenly some new style or color just looks right. It offers a new, timely source of aesthetic pleasure.
Until recently, however, that pleasure came attached to a particular meaning. Not everyone had access to the latest looks. Fresh styles were expensive, available at a limited number of retailers, and in many cases unknown to anyone but the cognoscenti until a year or so after they'd been introduced. So wearing the latest styles marked a fashionista as wealthy, well-connected, and well-informed.
Since this limited audience could pay high prices, new fashions also tended to be made with expensive materials and workmanship. Although they were often ephemeral, they tended to be made to last. That's still true at the highest end of the market, but the coming of "fast fashion" means that if all you want is the right look, you can buy it cheaply. If the style will be dead in a year, why buy a piece that will last any longer?
If being stylish means having the look of the moment, fast fashion is truly democratizing style. That creates an uncomfortable situation for businesses and individuals who depend on trendiness to create customer value and maintain personal status.
Over time, we can expect other sources of value to become more important. These may include quirky personal expression and style setting (think fashion icon Sarah Jessica Parker), classic elegance and sprezzatura, fine detail and craftsmanship, and customization.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 28, 2005 • Comments
The Cato Institute is soliciting nominations for the 2006 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty: "The winner needs only meet one criterion: to have made a significant contribution to advancing human liberty. Nominees may be from any and all walks of life. Scholars, activists, and political leaders have been among the hundreds of nominations submitted for the first two prizes." Submit nominations here. The deadline is December 31.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 28, 2005 • Comments
Social scientists want to know. Swedish economist Niclas Berggren is asking Dynamist blog readers "to participate in a scientific study of beauty carried out by three academic economists: Associate Professor Niclas Berggren, The Ratio Institute, Dr. Henrik Jordahl, Uppsala University, and Professor Panu Poutvaara, University of Helsinki. They study how differences in beauty, and some related traits, are perceived, and for this purpose they need respondents from different countries. Respondents have the option to participate in a lottery with a 200 (approx. $235) prize."
The survey asks you to rate the looks of various people in head shots, on characteristics including beauty, trustworthiness, intelligence, and age. To participate, go to this link and write DYNAMIST as your city of residence. All replies are anonymous. The deadline for participation is December 8.
You can email questions to niclas.berggren-at-ratio.se.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 28, 2005 • Comments
This WaPost article on Black Monday highlights a rarely remarked-on workplace transformation. As work moves from physical production to creative effort and personal interaction, employers are paying not for time but for output. With the boss's permission "work time" often encompasses personal activities, from chatting with colleagues to shopping online.
Postell Carter, a database manager for the New Israel Fund in the District, squeezes online shopping trips into his day in bits and pieces. "Generally every couple of hours I'll take a little break," he said, adding that he might go online to buy clothes for his kids or flowers for his wife. It rarely takes more than 10 minutes, he said.
He plans to start his Christmas shopping in earnest this week.
Carter said his boss is easygoing about online shopping, as employers increasingly are. Several major local companies said they are fine with employees doing personal errands on the job as long as they do not abuse the privilege.
"We actually think it's productive if they do it that way instead of running out to a suburban mall and stretching the one-hour lunch into two," said Bob Dobkin, a spokesman for Pepco, which has 2,500 employees in the area. "We do think it promotes a better employee relationship."
Workplace consultants say employers' attitudes about online shopping are evolving, generally in favor of giving more leeway to employees. Where many companies once blocked access to high-volume shopping sites, for example, they now use threshold software that simply limits an employee's time on such sites, said Susan Larson, vice president of global threat analysis and research for SurfControl, which makes filtering software for workplaces. Today, she said, companies are more worried about employees bringing viruses into an office network by shopping online than they are about reduced productivity.
One of the first books to examine how different employees draw the boundaries between work and home was sociologist Chris Nippert-Eng's fascinating Home and Work
, which I wrote about in Forbes ASAP.
Blurring home and work can make work much more pleasant. But it can also make people feel like they're always at work. Social critics (and harried employees) who complain about the "overworked American" rarely consider how much personal time employees are consuming on the job.
Compared to service workers, manufacturing employees have far less flexibility on the job, because each has to integrate his or her production with everyone else's, and with an often-continuous flow of material. When I interviewed managers at American Leather for my NYT feature on the company, they noted that the American-born children of their immigrant factory employees rarely wanted to work in the plant and, when they did take jobs at American Leather, second-generation plant employees quit. Even when they have no white-collar options, they prefer lower-paid but less structured positions in retailing.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 28, 2005 • Comments
In chapter four of The Substance of Style I discuss how unusual aesthetics often start as ideological or religious statements, only to have their meanings diluted over time, as more and more people adopt them, at first because they embrace some of the original meaning and then increasingly simply because they like the style. The same pattern occurs with such diverse styles as neo-Gothic architecture in the 19th century and dreadlocks in the 20th century.
In an article on the new book Queens: Portraits of Black Women and Their Fabulous Hair, the NYT's Guy Trebay delves a bit into the complex relationship between pleasure and meaning in the styling of black women's hair.
"Black people perhaps have always pushed the boundaries of creativity in this country," explained [Queens author] Mr. [George] Alexander, whose book is also the subject of an exhibition at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C. "During the slave era there were obvious limits in terms of what you could do, since you were considered property. Basically, ever since, there has been this expanding desire to express oneself." That expression now takes the form of hairstyles that may involve the chemical processes that continue to stoke the multibillion-dollar, so-called ethnic personal-care market, but that equally results in Macy Gray Afros or the microbraids popularized by African immigrants, or else corn rows or Bantu knots or Bolga braids or the Barbie-style hair extension favored by Naomi Campbell and Beyoncé Knowles.
Most surprising perhaps, among the styles now popular among African-American women is dreadlocks (now called locks), an ancient coiffure often exclusively associated with the Rastafarians and now an ordinary hair-care option at many black hair salons.
"Fifteen years ago locks were still a heavily politicized thing," explained Shannon Ayers, the proprietor of the Harlem salon and day spa Turning Heads, who appears in "Queens" with her locked hair plaited into braids as thick as hawsers.
A decade ago, when Ms. Ayers decided to abandon her corporate job in publishing, she stopped processing her hair and let it lock naturally. Her early experiments involved nothing more radical than prim little twists. Even at that, "my family thought I had lost my mind," she said. "And if I met a Mr. Banker or Lawyer, the reaction was, 'I can't be bringing somebody with these little Buckwheat things in her head to my corporate functions.' "
Now about half the clients at Ms. Ayers's salon come to have their hair styled in the locks, twists and coils worn by women as disparate as Ms. Morrison and Lauryn Hill.
"It's not radical anymore," said Cherare Robertson, a police officer in Washington, whose rust-tinged and restyled locks were set to dry one afternoon last week beneath a cap dryer that anomalously brought the Donna Reed 1950's to mind. "A couple years ago I just stopped worrying about satisfying society and started to enjoy my own beauty," she said.
Queens, which I haven't seen, includes glamorous black-and-white portraits by Michael Cunningham, whose earlier book Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats is a favorite of mine.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 24, 2005 • Comments
A reader writes:
The part of Almost Girl's post that you left out in the middle of that paragraph actually interested me a great deal. You know, about arts patronage. The sort of socialite who's going to drop $20,000 for a handbag is, after all, exactly the sort who probably also sits on opera and orchestra boards and may have donated a wing to the art museum with her husband. That's not the same as shoving a briefcase full of cash at an individual starving artist, but buying artworks is; rich people do that, too.
Actually, I think that for those of us who are affluent but not super-loaded--a much larger segment of the population--Almost Girl's calculations are still somewhat off. I decided to splurge and spent $600 on two credit card wallets last week. (That's not a frequent event in my life, just so you know--though I did smirk and think, Take that, Anna Quindlen, as I handed over my credit card.) But I did so after I'd planned my holiday season budget, including what I was going to donate to charitable organizations. If I hadn't spent that $600 at Vuitton, it would have sat in my bank account. Of course, it would have been invested from there, anyway, but this way part of it goes directly to the wages of not only leatherworkers and vice presidents of marketing but also saleswomen, janitors, and security guards. I don't see why helping them make a living is wasteful.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 23, 2005 • Comments
Julie Frederickson, a.k.a. Almost Girl, has done a great job rounding up blog posts that provide a window into the attitudes of the young and fashionable. As someone who thinks Carrie Bradshaw had great attitude but hideous clothes (and don't get me started on the scary, misanthropic Jim Kuntsler), I feel a little out of place on her Black Friday blogroll. I'm more comfortable around computer geeks, not to mention economists, than fashionistas. But I do like beautiful, tactile clothes and the markets that provide them.
Those markets don't always behave the way fashionistas would like, leading to some contradictory blogging on Julie's part. In this post, she bemoans the latest trend in luxury markets, quoting a WWD article:
In a buoyant luxury market, ultraexpensive items--from $6,000 Azzedine Alaïa shearling jackets to $21,000 Bottega Veneta handbags--have become a surprise hit, selling briskly to a superrich clientele in search of the exceptional.
Julie has understandable sticker shock. What a waste of money! "I'll tell you what, you want to get something exceptional? Fund me for an entire year! I can easily live off of $21,000 (I live off of about $1,000 a month now and quite comfortably I might add, not including the cost of my college tuition). For the cost of one of your hand bags you could send me to New York City so that I could have the resources to pursue my dream in the glossies....So if anyone out there is reading this blog I would like a patron please! I promise to provide compelling articles, do valuable research, and add a needed dose of intellectualism to the fashion scene! Will you really miss the handbag?"
As an equally bourgeois person who considers my $400 purse (bought when I was 45 and had been self-supporting for more than two decades) a huge splurge, I sympathize. But this attitude directly contradicts an earlier posting on how the trendy but cheaply constructed "fast fashion" (analogous to fast food) at stores like H&M has eroded the public's appreciation of craftsmanship and fine design. Julie and other fashion bloggers also worry that big chains, with their mass merchandising, make it hard for young designers to find a market.
The "fast fashion" post mixes a lot of different issues, but the economic bottom line is that people should buy more expensive clothes, at more expensive stores, and keep them longer. "Let's appreciate everything that goes into our clothing, have less of it but make it better," she writes.
Here we have a classically bourgeois attitude, with an elitist twist. Cheap is bad, and so is expensive. The right price is the one I'm willing to pay. The right priorities are mine.
But those Bottega Veneta bags are expensive for a reason. They not only use luxurious, expensive materials, but require meticulous, time-consuming craftsmanship. Only a few people in Italy have the necessary skills. And since the "production runs" are quite small, distribution and logistic costs are quite high per bag. I'm not saying that everyone should lust after a $21,000 purse (my car didn't cost that much, and I bought it new), only that rare design and craftsmanship have a cost. You can't have Bottega Veneta quality at H&M prices. The ultra-high end market is preserving artisanal skills.
And luxury companies know that in a world of fast fashion, they need to sell the intrinsic qualities of their merchandise. "We are back to luxury as an indulgence, not a show," said Bottega Veneta CEO Patrizio di Marco at the World Luxury Congress, a conference last month in Paris. (I was one of the speakers, the only one who talked not about luxury per se but about the increasingly aesthetic economy in which luxury goods compete.)
The great thing about fashion markets today is how diverse they are, even outside of major metro areas. Many different styles coexist and there isn't a simple, price-based status hierarchy. You can buy trendy but disposable clothes--"fast fashion"--or classic, enduring pieces. Basic jeans, sweaters, and T-shirts cost about the same, in nominal dollars, as they did when I was a teenager in the late 1970s, and their materials and construction are generally much better. Those cheap clothes are also helping a billion Chinese climb out of abject poverty.
The bad thing about fashion markets today is how many empire-waist tops and dresses they sell. I don't care how cute, young, and skinny you are. Those things make you look pregnant.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 22, 2005 • Comments