An avalanche of paper overwhelms most TIME staffers every week. But those involved in this week's cover story found themselves buried under something more than the usual pile of memos and files: Babel-like towers of catalogues listing everything from jewels to jelly beans. His office glutted with glossy booklets and brochures, Senior Writer Michael Demarest was astonished by the profusion of goods offered by specialty houses, though he has long consulted catalogues to meet his gardening needs. Indeed, he has admired the process ever since he managed to order, in French, a complicated engine part for his French sloop.

Reporter-Researcher Elizabeth Rudulph is less enthusiastic. The only time she ever ordered items (a turtleneck shirt, shorts, slacks) from a catalogue, she had to return them. Nothing fit. Since then, she has acquired a cocker spaniel who likes to chew catalogues and who, she thinks, might look dandy in a mail-order canine jogging suit. "It's a temptation," says Rudulph, "but I think I'll resist." Last week as Rudulph's office began to overflow with scores of catalogues, she noted that many are not only surprisingly soft sell but distinguished by their slim elegance. Or as New York Correspondent Adam Zagorin put it, "Until I reported this story, I thought of a catalogue as something you sat on as a child to get a haircut. Nowadays you'd need a lot of them."

Big and small, handsome and clunky, catalogues have poured into the Houston home of TIME'S Lianne Hart at the rate of half a dozen a week. Six months ago, she ordered a stationery embosser. Says Hart: "Since then, I've been getting catalogues from companies that specialize in everything from hammers to feathered negligees." Correspondent Patricia Delaney of Chicago had no sooner finished her reporting for the story than she sat down to order Christmas gifts by catalogue. Plus one apparently irresistible present for herself: a $5 Australian pineapple peeler.

But probably nobody at TIME was more involved with catalogues than Photographer Carl Fischer, who was supplied with an estimated 500 for the cover photo. Fischer finds mail orders invaluable: "I loathe being crushed in department store crowds and dressing and undressing in those funny little rooms. So I've become an inveterate catalogue buyer."

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