{"id":73947,"date":"2014-07-15T16:08:41","date_gmt":"2014-07-15T20:08:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=73947"},"modified":"2014-12-29T00:17:17","modified_gmt":"2014-12-29T05:17:17","slug":"power-tools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/15\/power-tools\/","title":{"rendered":"Power Tools"},"content":{"rendered":"

The hidden poetry of industrial-supply catalogs.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"MuralesRome\"<\/a>

Photo: Nicholas Gemini<\/p><\/div>\n

When I was nine or ten, riding in the backseat of my mom\u2019s car as we drove the gauntlet of strip malls, car dealerships, big-box stores, and fast-food franchises that constituted our suburb\u2019s commercial district, I realized that all of the tall signs and buildings had been constructed and erected by actual people, different crews of people. I thought about all the Burger King and Mattress Discounters signs in the world, how each had been shipped from somewhere, delivered to someone, received, assembled, mounted, electrified. I attributed a lot of power and reach to corporations, especially those that advertised on TV, and to understand that they comprised real people was something of an epiphany\u2014especially in suburbia, where corporate authority rests in the illusion that no human labor has gone into transforming and homogenizing the landscape. All the stores were just there<\/em>. What else could there be?<\/p>\n

That moment is part of what informs my fascination with the Grainger catalog<\/a>, a massive, 4,322-plus page industrial-supply inventory with which I first became acquainted last year, when a friend gave it to me for my birthday. Released annually on February 1, it\u2019s an omnibus of 590,000 products\u2014power tools, fasteners, pneumatics, hydraulics, pumps, raw materials, janitorial necessities, HVAC and refrigeration components\u2014a work of pure utility, designed, honed, and focus-grouped to provide ready access to its most arcane sections. I can\u2019t get enough of it. For the uninitiated, it provides a glimpse at the invisible infrastructure girding the world of construction, maintenance, repair, and operations. Grainger\u2019s aggressively salt-of-the-earth slogan is \u201cFor the Ones Who Get It Done,\u201d and the joy of perusing its catalog is in seeing how very many things there are to get done, and how many ways we have of doing them.<\/p>\n

And so I often reach for it in pursuit of a kind of materialist awe. It makes for a reading experience more engaging, imaginative, and informative than almost anything that passes as literature. I\u2019ve put down novels to pick up the Grainger catalog, which holds court on my coffee table and which could, in a pinch, serve as a coffee table unto itself.<\/p>\n

Grainger sells mail-room organizers, carpet deodorizers, hairnet dispensers, and gutter-deicing cables. They sell a three-stage, heavy-traffic floor-matting system designed to entrap heavy debris. They sell miniature high-precision stainless-steel ball bearings with extended inner rings. They sell 550-foot rolls of foam for protecting electronics and an oil-filtration system for high-viscosity fluids. Their catalog contains a proliferation of heavily modified nouns that denote things I never knew existed, or things I\u2019d intuited to exist, but had never really considered.<\/p>\n

Metalized polyester film tape.<\/p>\n

GMP\/GLP data output moisture analyzers.<\/p>\n

Electrostatic dissipative (ESD) gloves.<\/p>\n

Cup point alloy steel socket set screws. <\/p>\n

\"grainger1\"<\/a>

Catalog #405<\/p><\/div>\n

In the specificity of its language, the catalog summons a rigorously taxonomic legion of hardware and stuff<\/em>, the matter from which cities and roads are composed, the contrivances that keep machines running and power flowing and ventilators ventilating. It puts a real gleam on human ingenuity. We made these things. They\u2019re everywhere. Spend enough time poring over the catalog and it begins to color your world; you\u2019ll close it and walk to the refrigerator only to find yourself marveling at the hinges, screws, grilles, handles, nozzles, toggles, crisper drawers, and various constituents of the appliance instead of getting a beer. Who needs a beer? You could own a wide selection of pneumatic solenoid air valves.<\/p>\n

Or push\/pull paddle tubular locksets.<\/p>\n

NIOSH-approved ISCBA industrial SCBAs.<\/p>\n

Wall-switch occupancy sensors.<\/p>\n

NSF-listed plate casters.<\/p>\n

Then there are the item descriptions. If \u201cFor sale: baby shoes, never worn\u201d counts as a story, then so, too, must \u201call-wood coffins store flat and assemble without tools. Can be stacked 3-high when assembled to maximize space in mass-casualty emergencies.\u201d Or: \u201cHigh-visibility warning whips alert other vehicles of your presence.\u201d Or: \u201cStretch knit material covers head to protect from overspray.\u201d<\/p>\n

Arguably literature\u2019s basic charge is to describe being in the world\u2014the Grainger catalog reveals just how extensively our writers have failed to document the varieties of work happening now, and the hyper-precise terminology surrounding that work. Poetry and prose are some of the few venues for a culture to examine its language; in a sense, the bulk of our poetry and prose is marked by a paucity of information.<\/p>\n

Granted, a novel full of phrases like \u201clight- to medium-traffic dry-area antifatigue matting\u201d wouldn\u2019t make for a terribly lively read\u2014if someone were to publish a hyperrealist story in which a plumber solves a complicated problem with a schedule-eighty polypropylene socket-fused fitting, I alone might find merit in it. But look at writers like Wallace, whose fascination with neologisms captures the sea change that technology has brought to bear on how we communicate; or Leyner, with his satirical slumgullion of pharmaceutical jargon and high-impact ad copy; or DeLillo, whose \u201cHuman Moments in World War III\u201d declares, \u201cThe thing science does best is name the features of the world.\u201d There\u2019s room for potent work that wrestles with the flux and expansion of our syntax.<\/p>\n

I want the Great American Static-Resistant Sorbent Novel.<\/p>\n

Two-in-one squeegee pushbrooms.<\/p>\n

Negative-rake carbine turning inserts.<\/p>\n

Flange-mount disconnect enclosures.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

\"door<\/a>

A sample page from the latest Grainger catalog.<\/p><\/div>\n

Grainger was founded in 1927 by William Wallace Grainger, a Chicago electrical engineer who sold hard-to-find motors out of the back of his station wagon. His first catalog was eight pages. He called it the MotorBook.<\/p>\n

Deb Oler\u2014vice president and general manager, Grainger Brand\u2014was kind enough to indulge my obsession with the catalog, which she proclaimed \u201cthe largest printed book in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can\u2019t actually make it any bigger,\u201d Oler told me. \u201cWe spent a huge amount of time working with the people who make our paper to make it as thin as it can possibly be while still holding up for a really long period of time. We always think, What are things we can do to get more space? But we can\u2019t bind any bigger than we bind now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Its distribution is two and a half million. Only two printers in the world have the technology to produce it. The ultra-lightweight paper\u2014that\u2019s the technical term\u2014is so tissue thin that a Bible\u2019s looks lavish in comparison. The entire project comes down to a \u201cteam of thirty, a very tenured group of people,\u201d and of these, only eight are dedicated to copyediting\u2014no mean feat, given that in my many hours with the catalog I\u2019ve discovered only one typo.<\/p>\n

Compiling a book of this size poses obvious editorial challenges. For one: What goes in, what stays out? Oler said, \u201cWe have hard hats that have every football team in America\u2019s logo on them. Do we need to show all of those, or can we show a representative sample? Will people\u2019s feelings be hurt because their team isn\u2019t there?\u201d<\/p>\n

And what do you call things, how do you file them? Drinking fountains, for instance, which Grainger sells, are known in various parts of the nation as water fountains, bubblers, or coolers. There are trash cans and then there are waste receptacles and garbage bins. All of this occasions impassioned semantic debate. The deep, quasi-Teutonic satisfaction of the Grainger catalog is that everything, finally, has been named. Everything has been indexed and put where it belongs.<\/p>\n

Diamond-knurled press inserts.<\/p>\n

Self-sealing pan-head machine screws.<\/p>\n

Octal-base specialty voltage relays.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe spend time watching people use the catalog in native situations,\u201d Oler said. \u201cWe time how long it takes to find things. We time what happens when we take things out or put new things in.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are those who would object to the waste of a printed volume like this. No matter how responsibly its paper is sourced\u2014Oler made mention of the Forest Stewardship Council\u2014it\u2019s still a cumbersome, tree-hungry tome. But there are few books whose design and function make such a convincing argument for their existence in print. The Grainger catalog has colored indices at its center, where the book stays open and its pages can be flipped more easily with one hand. It has a durable spine and a series of black bands running down its edge to designate different sections.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the customer shows up, they have a problem,\u201d Oler said. \u201cEither something isn\u2019t working or isn\u2019t going to work.\u201d The catalog is one of the few reference texts around whose print iteration is more efficient than its digital counterpart. You look in it to find things and you find them. It is, itself, a tool, designed to provide \u201cthe right amount of information to make a decision quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"1935<\/a>

The back of a 1935 McMaster-Carr catalog. Photo: Bill Carrier<\/p><\/div>\n

Of course, though it\u2019s nearest to my heart, the Grainger catalog is not the only one of its kind. There\u2019s also the McMaster-Carr<\/a>, whose distinctive yellow cover and limited print runs make it especially coveted by industrial-supply fetishists: the backsides of early twentieth-century editions bore the label \u201cAn Industrial Encyclopedia.\u201d There\u2019s Fastenal, which calls its catalog \u201cBig Blue<\/a>,\u201d and MSC Industrial Direct, which puts out \u201cThe Big Book<\/a>\u201d\u2014names that suggest the engulfing totality of this enterprise. Above all, an industrial supplier strives to be comprehensive. What\u2019s seductive about these catalogs is the promise of a certain exhaustive quality, a list so meticulous as to seem interminable. \u201cOur customers have told us time and again,\u201d Deb Oler said, \u201cI want to be able to come to you for everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such as solar-powered automatic gable-mount attic ventilators.<\/p>\n

Ultrasonic wall-thickness gages.<\/p>\n

Expandable gravity skate-wheel conveyors.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur customers are the people that sit in the background of every business,\u201d Oler told me. \u201cYou don\u2019t think about your light bulbs until they\u2019re off. You don\u2019t care about the toilet or the sink until it doesn\u2019t work. The people who are our customers \u2026 they\u2019re MacGyvers. They see themselves as problem solvers, and they are. If you look at any building and the people who work in it, there are literally thousands of products that you would need to keep that building operating.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even so, their best-selling product, Oler said, is probably toilet paper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The hidden poetry of industrial-supply catalogs. 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