---
title: "Catalog News"
url: https://catalog-news.com/
description: "Original writing on catalogues, printed ephemera and the mail-order trade: page grammar, print production, order forms, trade and seed catalogues, and the care of loose."
---

# Catalog News

Craft · The week's lead

A spread reduced to its structure: rows of item blocks, a running head, and a rule separating each row from the next.

## [The catalogue as an instrument for choosing](https://catalog-news.com/the-catalogue-as-an-instrument-for-choosing/)

A catalogue page is not written to be read from top to bottom. It is built so that a reader can hold several things side by side and decide between them.

Most printed matter assumes a reader who begins at the beginning. A catalogue assumes the opposite. Its reader arrives with a question already formed, opens somewhere in the middle, and wants to compare a handful of similar things quickly enough to choose one. Everything distinctive about catalogue design follows from that single assumption.

The consequence is that the working unit of the page is not the sentence or the paragraph but the item block: a small bounded region carrying a picture, a name, a short description, and a line of specifications. The block is the thing being compared. The page is a device for putting blocks near each other.

[Continue reading this piece](https://catalog-news.com/the-catalogue-as-an-instrument-for-choosing/)