Retailer J. Peterman Files for Bankruptcy
—The New York Times, January 26, 1999
Hemingway used one. So did Scott Fitzgerald. The last tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, used one all the time before that nasty business at Yekaterinburg. “It” was a simple wastepaper basket, or “basque,” as the French say. Perfect for throwing things away, as long as the “things” aren’t too big. You can put it near a desk, or not. You can throw drafts of your novel or receipts from a store into it. The old, great ones were round, sturdy, made of strong woven wire. We found one just like it. Sort of. Ours is plastic and slightly scuffed.
Color: Prison gray.
Price: $125.
Somewhere it is 1947. The country is back to work. The war is over. The “boys” are home. Everyone’s wearing hats, even children. People eat lunch at Automats. Things are “Martinized.” Cars are huge. Gravy is put on everything. And water coolers. Down at the end of the hall. In every office in America. Big, blue-green glass bottles holding clean, cold, crisp water. And by its side a long metal tube dispensing delicate conical paper cups so small that you have to fill one six or eight times for a satisfying drink. No matter. We’ve found one exactly like those old ones. Only in plastic. And empty. But you can fill it. How, we don’t know. But good luck to you.
Price: $450.
I was talking once with the former Duchess of Windsor, Wallis Simpson, and I asked her what it was that made her fall in love with the King. She said—I’ll never forget this—“Paper. He always has reams and reams of paper handy.” No surprise there. Helen of Troy is said to have had the same weakness. Years ago, the really great paper was made from trees. We’ve found some just like that, reproduced perfectly. Packed neatly in stacks of five hundred sheets. Ten tidily wrapped packages to a box. Ideal for home or office.
Price: $85 per box.
Once, many years ago, a young man—say, a member of an Indian tribe somewhere out in the West where Indians lived—would leave his village on the eve of his sixteenth birthday and wander alone into the woods without food, water, or clothes. He was not allowed to return to the village until he had built himself some nice shelves. True story, I think. The Indian shelves were made of pine or oak or some other wood. We’ve searched the world for the same kind. Found a pressed polyvibrafoam reproduction that looks just like it right here in Kentucky.
Price: $230. (Brackets with metal screws: $65 each.)
Garbo was obsessed with it. Jack Kennedy is said to have wooed Marilyn on it. Noël Coward wrote a play about it, though there’s no “evidence” of that. The classic postwar industrial carpeting was thin, flimsy, and badly soiled. We’ve managed to locate a cache of just such a product. Yards of it, all brownish-gray, rolled up on huge spools near our loading dock.
Color: Army-mess-hall-beef brown.
Price: $18 sq. yd.
I had just survived a nasty mishap when my single-engine Piper PA-28 Cherokee crashed in Egypt and I was laid up in a Cairo hospital. My nurse, a Bedouin, had wandered away into the night and was nowhere to be found. A fire broke out and I managed to drag myself to safety, only to be set upon by Israeli Mossad agents. I was interrogated for three days somewhere in the Negev, giving them only my name, my occupation, and my thoughts on the wholesale potential of a near-perfect replica of the Israeli Air Force beret. What this has to do with the fact that we have twelve gross of toner cartridges, I don’t know. But we do. And they’re for sale.
Color: Inky black.
Price: Make me an offer.
1999