Look, I tended bar in Park Slope for forty-one years, so I know a thing or two about people wanting the same drink, the same stool, the same Wednesday. Catalogs are like that. Once you find one you like, you don't really want to keep hunting. You want it in the mailbox, you want to flip through it with a cup of coffee, and you want to maybe circle a sweater for your daughter-in-law without anybody emailing you about it for the next six weeks.
So how do you find catalogs in 2026, when half the world thinks paper is a war crime and the other half can't see their phone screen without dragging it three feet from their nose? Glad you asked, pal. Pull up a stool.
First, the bad news (and it's not that bad)
A bunch of catalogs you might remember are gone or thinned out. Delia's, the one all the teenage girls in 1998 had stuffed under their beds, eventually went bankrupt and now lives on as an online-only sub-brand of Dolls Kill. No paper coming. Same goes for a lot of brands that didn't survive the last two recessions and the great Amazon swallowing.
Plenty of others, though, are still putting ink on paper and shipping it to your door for free. Lands' End. Cabela's. Bass Pro. Pottery Barn. Oriental Trading. Herrschners (for the yarn folks). L.L. Bean. Vermont Country Store, which somehow still mails me a catalog twice a year even though I told them I moved in 2009.
That last one is a free preview of the rest of this article. They want to send you the catalog. You barely have to ask.
The easiest way: just ask the store
Most retailers that still print a catalog have a page on their website that says, more or less, “hey, want one?” You type in your name and address and a few weeks later it shows up. Three things to know about this:
- It really is free. No credit card. No “just $1 for shipping.”
- It takes one to three weeks, usually. Don't sit by the door.
- If you can't find a request page, look for the “Contact” link and email customer service. Half the time someone in a call center in Maine just adds you manually. Bless them.
The site I work for, full disclosure, is Catalogs.com, which is basically a switchboard for this whole operation. You browse the categories, you find a brand you want, you click through. Saves you from having to remember if it's potterybarn-dot-com or pottery-barn-dot-com (it's the first one, but you get my point).
The sneaky way: the postcard inside the catalog
This is my favorite. You're at your sister-in-law's house. She's making coffee. You're flipping through her Plow & Hearth catalog because what else are you going to do, watch the Hallmark Channel?
Somewhere in the middle, there's a little postage-paid card the size of a grocery list. Pop it out, write your address on it, drop it in the mail. Done. Free. No website. No password you have to reset because you forgot it three months ago like the rest of them.
(My ex-wife used to do this with magazines at the dentist's office. I'm not endorsing it, but I'm not condemning it either. The dentist had it coming.)
The in-store route
If you still go into actual stores — and good for you if you do — a lot of them keep a stack of the current catalog by the register or the front door. Take one. They're hoping you will. The associate ringing you up can usually sign you up for the mailing list right there too. Two seconds. No phone call to a robot.
Social media, sort of
I'm not the guy who's gonna tell you to spend more time on Facebook. The good Lord knows you've already got a cousin posting conspiracy theories at three in the morning. But.
If you follow your favorite stores on Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest, you'll see the new collections roll out, you'll catch the sales, and a lot of them post a link to request the print catalog right there. You don't even have to scroll past your cousin to see it — just go to the store's page directly. Use the search bar. It's the magnifying glass. You knew that.
The newsletter trick
Here's a thing nobody tells you. If a brand has stopped printing a catalog, their email newsletter is essentially the same product. Same product photos, same sale announcements, same “new fall arrivals.” You sign up once on the home page, you get the goods.
I know, I know — one more email. But you can route it to a separate Gmail address you only check on Sundays. (If you don't have one, your grandkid can set it up in eight minutes. Bribe them with pizza.)
What about the catalog tsunami?
Here's the only real downside, and it's worth mentioning before you go nuts requesting forty of these things. Once you're on a couple of mailing lists, the lists get traded around. Pretty soon you're getting a Harry & David catalog you didn't ask for, then a Hammacher Schlemmer, then six different home decor outfits with names that all sound like a law firm.
Two free fixes for when it gets out of hand:
- CatalogChoice.org — free service, lets you cancel specific catalogs one at a time. Their database has nearly 10,000 of them.
- DMAchoice.org — six bucks, lasts ten years, broader strokes. Stops most promotional mail by category.
I use Catalog Choice when one specific outfit gets too aggressive. Worked fine. Took maybe a month for the mail to actually stop, but stop it did.
One last thing
The reason catalogs still work for folks our age — and I'll say “our age” because I'm seventy-three and earned the right — is that they're slow on purpose. You sit down. You turn pages. You don't get an algorithm trying to read your soul. You don't get a popup asking if you want twelve percent off if you give them your email and your firstborn.
You get a sweater. Or a pair of slippers. Or a cast iron skillet. And you decide, on your own time, whether you want it.
That, kid, is why these things are still around. Order one. Or six. Then maybe order a chair to read them in.
