{"id":81128,"date":"2014-12-26T15:00:04","date_gmt":"2014-12-26T20:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=81128"},"modified":"2014-12-22T11:49:54","modified_gmt":"2014-12-22T16:49:54","slug":"power-tools-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/12\/26\/power-tools-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Power Tools"},"content":{"rendered":"

The wonders 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. Read More >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The wonders of industrial-supply catalogs. 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16464],"tags":[14204,14624,14622,14620,1648,14618,14621,14623,14619,2393],"class_list":["post-81128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-2014","tag-catalogs","tag-deb-oler","tag-fastenal","tag-grainger","tag-industrial-design","tag-industrial-supply","tag-mcmaster-carr","tag-specialized-language","tag-w-w-grainger","tag-words"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Wonders of Industrial-Supply Catalogs<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Dan Piepenbring interviews the team behind the Grainger catalog.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/12\/26\/power-tools-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Power Tools by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"December 26, 2014 \u2013 The wonders of industrial-supply catalogs. 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