Leather Landline Telephone for $129 (In 1983 Dollars)

November 7, 2023 7:20 AM

DAK and the Golden Age of Gadget Catalogs "My wife's favorite (we have two) is the Leather Genie TM pictured above. (Yes, it's real Italian Leather stitched and hand-applied) It's just $129. It's glorious." Cabel Sasser has been snapping up DAK catalogs (named after owner Drew Alan Kaplan) for the last decade, and has assembled them into a blog post. But Kaplan didn't invent this genre of full-color gadget photos the Los Angeles TImes once called "the L.L.Bean of consumer electronics" alone: he credits marketer Joe Sugarman for the catalog's innovative style. Click any issue cover in the post to read or download.

Joe Sugarman unfortunately passed away in March 2022.

posted by AlSweigart (1 comment total)

Love this, thank you! I absolutely had the shortwave radio with the tape deck. Drew really had a knack for finding gadgets from overseas that you couldn’t get anywhere else, slap a DAK logo on it, and have it on the catalog.
posted by dr_dank at 7:26 AM on November 7, 2023