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Show The Daily Tub Chronicle. Thursday. December 7. 1978 jx Ridiculoms items tempt the rich by BARBARA Chronicle staff With each passing Christmas, available gifts become more imaginative, outrageous and expensive. Each year the number of grossly elite and downright ridiculous items for sale expand. Surely we all often buy things we don't really nerd; now it is possible, primarily through catalogs, to buy things you can't imagine a person could ever even want. "The idea is to compete with yourself. If things get bad and people start trading down, you'll be right there to sell them something else." So says Roger Horchow in an interview with Texas Monthly magazine. Horchow was the first man to create the luxury of the "specialty catalog" catalogs that are with no stores to back them up. He entirely mail-ordemore than $21 million this year, and, as to gross expects in the past, he may be getting checks from people like Robert Redford and Princess Grace of Monaco. Catering to the tastes of the rich (and. some would say, foolish) is Horchow's business. Horchow, along for sale in this year's Sakowitz Christmas catalog include your own private lighthouse on a Pacific Ocean shore. It comes on a island and has four bedrooms, a kitchen, fireplace, bathroom and a spiral staircase leading up to the lantern room. Cost? $750,000. Perfect for the family. Don't want to spend that much money on a Christmas present? Sakowitz offers an equally outrageous alternative. For $50,000 you can have a Houston city park named after you. complete with a monument or piece of sculpture to memorialize your personality. You'll also get to join Houston's mayor for the completion and dedication ceremony. A great gift for the boss. Feeling a bit extravagant with the greenbacks? Just got a raise? Sakowitz has a deal for you. You can buy rig for Christmas. It your own offshore comes with a crew of 78 and its own heliport, and you get to name this rig yourself and provide the drilling but at only location. Delivery won't be until mid-198a to it's up. pass toughie $28,700,000 Feel like playing God a wee bit this holiday? Sakowitz understands. You can arrange to have a gift of $1 million in the form of a cashier's check sent to the person of your choice, with you remaining the anonymous benefactor. continued on page 12 Items 77-sta- Neiman-Marcu- s headquarters in Texas, from the triumvirate behind the merchandising of The Luxury Item. Horchow collection The Horchow Collection, a catalog which many other similar businesses have almost shamelessly copied, is the series of catalogs in most successful strictly mail-orde- r the United States. This year Horchow's Christmas catalog cost SI million to produce, owing to the price slick paper, and the use of of lush graphics, the most expensive color reproduction techniques and top-quali- about. expensive. and Sakowitz, all with Neiman-Marcu- s 50-5- 0. old-fashion- ed r, with even if the catalog is unsolicited.) Monev may not be able to buy you love, but it sure as hell can buy you just about anything else. The cream of the "anything else" crop is what Sakowitz is all no longer free and unsolicited. Top price this year goes to Gucci, which is charging $5 for its Christmas catalog. Many stores arc now shying away from the word "catalog" and are choosing to call their expensive leaflets "books" or "collections." By October of this year, Horchow alone had already grossed $9 million in Christmas orders up 42 percent from last year. A sample of what people are ordering would include a pair of porcelain herons for $550, an infant's christening dress for $225. a $100 silver of serving spoons, antique opera glasses and pair a computerized chess partner. All have their prices in the Horchow Collection catalog for this year. With each turn of the page the smell of affluence grows stronger. The average consumer can fairly hear his checkbook screaming at the sight of Horchow's multidigit pricetags. Of the three catalogs mentioned Horchow, Neiman-Marcu- s and Sakowitz Horchow may be the most successful, but its sale items are certainly not the most RATTLE Neiman-Marcu- s, oil-drilli- which once employed this some great wallet-buster- s offering The company's highlighted gift idea for '78 is a solid chocolate replica of the game, with everything but the keepsake made of edible candy. Cost? $600. For more permanent, you might want to look a company is Horchow, Christmas. Christmas Monopoly instructions something collection of diamond into the Neiman-Marcu- s trinkets $27,000 for a pair of earrings (five carats in each ear,) $19,500 for a ring and $145,000 for a diamond necklace. It may not be very tasteful, but it sure isn't costume jewelry. Some great Neiman-Marcu- s gifts for Mom include a fur coat, a solid $150,000 Russian lynx gold for $2,250, antique handkerchiefs at makeup compact $650 apiece, a Queen Victoria desk for $150,000 and a set of six tape cassettes of Vincent Price telling her how to make yummy dinners. Good old Dad is easy to buy for at Neiman-Marcu- s too. Can't you just see his face when he finds you've barbells set of 24 kt. gold-plategiven him a for only $200? Or how about getting him "Boris," a computerized chess partner that can talk via programmed messages (it even says "congratulations" if the player wins the game) for $400. will hand deliver a book Better yet, Neiman-Marcu- s entitled The Roots of (fill in the name of your choice), with a forward by Alex Haley. Neiman-Marcu- s will research and use personal contacts to fill up as many of the book's blank pages as possible with the recipient's history. Instructions on how to continue the research are included. Price tag is $5,000. Vault space can also be purchased so you can hurry and safely lock away your Christmas gifts. Neiman-Marculease on a for $90,000, will get you a vault, unit, split into "His" and "Hers" sections, in Omniwest, a prestigious vault built into the side of a remote mountain in Utah's Wasatch Range. Rober Horchow might be considered the King of the Catalog by a lot of people in his Callas suburb-ru- n operation, but Sakowitz has to be considered the king of the pompous. ty 0, 10-car- at printing refinements. ir 33-car- at It comes as no surprise, then, that many catalogs are CHRISTMAS GIFT SPECIAL 18-k- t. 10-pou- THE ORIGINAL VELCRO LOCKING WALLET d A It Floats It s Washable It s Thin & Trim It's from Bear Body s, 50-ye- ar Sakowitz d r-- Catalog pushers know how important the mailing list is it would be fun to see Sakowitz's list. (An A.C. Neilson study shows that if a company has the "right" mailing list, the chances of making a sale are as high as , . BUY IT AT YOUR PARTICIPATING 1 7-1- STORES SGE? ranmnym afflf JBCB3 gxw orai JVC JL-A- The Latest in Stereo Hifi Design 20 ModelJL-A2- 079 Auto-Retur- n 0 Turntable. 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