The first ABC Distributing book I ever held was a slim summer flyer, printed on uncoated stock that smelled faintly of solvent, and it landed on my desk in St. Louis sometime in the late 1970s. A buddy of mine had jumped from Spiegel down to Florida to work for the Briskin family, and he sent me a copy with a note tucked inside: See what we’re doing with the back cover. The back cover was a four-up of resin figurines, candle holders, and a holiday wreath, all priced under ten dollars. That, in a single page, was the whole company.
A Florida operation, not an Illinois one
For the record, ABC Distributing was a North Miami outfit, founded in 1957, not a Bannockburn, Illinois business as some old write-ups still claim. The Briskin family ran it from a sprawling warehouse and headquarters complex out near the airport. By the early 2000s they had built a one-million-square-foot distribution center, which was the kind of footprint you needed if your bread and butter was high-volume, low-ticket impulse merchandise shipped one parcel at a time.
The merchandise mix was unmistakable to anyone who worked in the trade. Resin angels. Wind chimes. Throw blankets in seasonal patterns. Pocket knives sold three to a card. Ceramic Santas that would crowd a mantel by the second week of November. Sewing notions, garden flags, costume jewelry, kitchen gadgets, the kind of small bound photo albums you only see at funerals now. None of it was high-design, and none of it pretended to be. ABC sold what merchandisers used to call “gifty,” and they sold it cheap.
How the catalog actually arrived at your door
Most ABC books were eight-and-a-half by eleven, saddle-stitched, with a four-color cover and a lot of two-color interior signatures to keep the printing bill down. They mailed frequently — sometimes a fresh book every three or four weeks — and each one came with a fold-out order form, a pre-paid envelope, and a photo on the front of a smiling Briskin family member or a kitten in a basket. The frequency was the point. ABC understood, long before anyone said the word “retargeting,” that the customer who buys once at $14.99 will buy again next month if you put another book in her mailbox.
What happened to the ABC Distributing catalog
Here is the short answer: ABC Distributing was folded into LTD Commodities, the Bannockburn, Illinois sister-company that had been a friendly competitor for years. LTD itself was founded in 1963 and ran a nearly identical playbook out of the Midwest. The two operations had been in each other’s orbit for a long time before the consolidation, and by the mid-2010s the ABC name was being phased out in favor of LTD on the books most customers received.
If you log in today at ltdcommodities.com, the company itself will tell you that your old ABC Distributing account number, username, and password still work. Past orders, payment history, the whole file — it followed you over to the LTD side. As of early 2026, that’s the official line on the LTD “Welcome ABC” page, and the warehouse is still humming along in Bannockburn at 2800 Lakeside Drive.
Is the actual ABC Distributing catalog still mailed?
No. The ABC Distributing book itself has been quiet for years. What you receive now is the LTD Commodities catalog, which has absorbed most of what made ABC tick: the same general assortment, the same price-point philosophy, the same monthly cadence. If you are an old ABC subscriber and the books stopped coming, requesting an LTD catalog at their site puts you back on the rotation.
Why the model worked, and why it stopped working
I spent a few decades watching catalogs like ABC do something the e-commerce crowd still hasn’t fully figured out. The book itself was the storefront, the salesman, and the entertainment, all bound together for the cost of postage and a press run. A retired widow in Toledo could spend a Sunday afternoon paging through a forty-page ABC book with a cup of coffee, circle four items in pencil, and have a small gift to look forward to ten days later. That was a business.
What stopped working, and what stopped working for almost every house of this kind, was paper. Postal rates climbed every year. Print costs followed. The customer who used to buy six small things a year started buying two, because the same merchandise was a click away on a phone. The ABC name, which had been trading on its frequency and its warmth, lost its leverage. Folding into LTD let the merchandise survive even as the ABC masthead retired.
What you can still buy that feels like ABC
If you miss the actual ABC assortment — the resin keepsakes, the seasonal wreaths, the bargain throws — the closest match in 2026 is still the LTD Commodities book, in print and online. A few other houses that scratch the same itch:
- Collections Etc. — very similar in tone, with a deep bench of inexpensive home, garden, and gift items. Different ownership, but the merchandiser’s eye is in the same neighborhood.
- The Lakeside Collection. Another long-running general gift book that competes head-on with what ABC and LTD do.
- Miles Kimball and Walter Drake. Personalized gifts and small household goods, in the same low-ticket tradition. Both are still mailing.
- Harriet Carter. The grandmother of the gadget-and-gift book, and still putting out a recognizable catalog.
None of them is ABC, exactly. ABC had its own particular Florida character — a touch warmer, a touch more religious in its merchandise selection around the holidays, and quicker to put a dolphin or a flamingo on something than the Midwestern houses ever were. That flavor is gone. What survived is the format.
A practical note for longtime ABC customers
Three things to do if you used to shop the ABC book and want to pick up where you left off:
- Visit ltdcommodities.com and try your old ABC Distributing sign-in. If it works, your order history is intact and you can request a paper book from inside your account.
- If your account doesn’t come up, call LTD’s customer service line and have them look you up by the address on your old ABC labels. They have been doing this for years and the staff knows the drill.
- Don’t pay an outside “catalog request” service to mail you an ABC book. There isn’t one to mail. Anything claiming otherwise is selling you a list, not a catalog.
I keep one ABC book on my shelf, a Christmas issue from around 1994, the cover crowded with poinsettia-pattern napkins and a kid in a Santa hat. Compared to a 2026 phone screen, it’s a piece of working-class Americana — the printing crooked in two places, the order form dog-eared from the previous owner. The merchandise lives on, under another name, in another state. The book itself belongs to the era that made it. That’s how almost all of these stories end, and there’s no shame in it.
