Mail-order food predates almost every other catalog category on this site. When Harry and David Holmes began shipping Oregon pears across the country in 1934, they established a template the gourmet-food business still runs on: take something perishable and regional, pack it to survive a few days in transit, and sell …

Endless online scrolling is supposed to make gift-buying easier, and for a specific item it does. But shopping for a person rather than a product — a hard-to-buy-for relative, a coworker you barely know, a milestone that calls for something thoughtful — is exactly where an open-ended search engine fails and a curated …

Say you need a piece of jewelry for a specific occasion — an anniversary, a graduation, a milestone birthday — and you would rather not spend a Saturday at a mall counter being upsold by commission staff. Buying jewelry by catalog solves that, but it raises an obvious concern: how do you judge quality and value without …