“There's a Haynes-Cooper catalog in every farmer's kitchen,” remarks a Wisconsin woman in Fanny Herself, Edna Ferber's 1917 novel depicting the Chicago mail-order industry. “The Bible's in the parlor, but they keep the H.C. book in the room where they live.” Harry Crews, in his 1978 autobiography of his boyhood in Bacon County, Georgia, recalls a similar centrality accorded the secular “Big Book” or “Farmer's Bible” in his family's tenant-farmer shanty. The highest form of entertainment for him was to thumb through the Sears, Roebuck catalog with his black friend Willalee and make up fantasies about the models on the book's pages. Writes Crews, “Without that catalog our childhood would have been radically different. The federal government ought to strike a medal for Sears, Roebuck Company for sending all those catalogs to farming families, for bringing all that color and all that mystery and all that beauty into the lives of country people.”