If you have it was the whole transaction
A mail-order catalogue page listed a shop's whole stock in tiny type, and a customer's circled entry and hopeful margin note were the only marks they ever made on it.
Newsprint-thin paper, ruled into a dense grid of about twenty listings under one heading:
NEW AND RESTOCKED. Tiny type, a format abbreviation and a price against every title. One entry is
circled in biro. In the margin, three words: if you have it.
That circle and that note are the only things on the page a machine didn't print. Everything else came back weeks later, or didn't come back at all.
What is a mail-order catalogue page actually recording?
A shop's stock on a given day, typed up and posted to someone who couldn't visit.
Before a phone call or a website could do it, a record shop or a distributor listed what it had — title, artist, format, price — and mailed it to a list of customers. The page itself is a snapshot: everything available on the day it went to the printer, which by the time it reached a letterbox was already slightly out of date.
Why did buying like this take weeks?
Because every step was a letter, not a click.
A customer read the page, circled what they wanted, wrote a cheque, and posted both back. The shop opened the post days later, checked whether the record was still in, and mailed it — or didn't, if someone faster had already claimed it. There was no way to know which outcome you'd get until something arrived, or didn't.
What does "if you have it" actually mean?
It's a customer admitting the shop might already be out.
Three words, and they carry the whole transaction: I want this, I know you might not still have it, send it anyway if you do. Nobody writes that sentence about a shop with a website and a stock counter that updates as they type. It only makes sense when the gap between ordering and knowing is weeks long, and hoping is genuinely all that's left to do.
Why the circle and the note are the design
Everything else printed on the page is the shop's information. The circle and the margin note are the only marks the customer made, which is why they're what makes one copy different from every other copy of the same page in the same print run.
Were the format abbreviations really their own language?
Close to it, for anyone who read the page regularly.
LP, 12", 7", CD, cass. — short enough to fit a narrow column, and second nature within a
few issues to somebody who bought this way often. To anybody seeing the page for the first time, a
dense block of abbreviations and prices would look closer to a code than a list.
Can it use real titles and a real distributor's name?
Not without asking — a catalogue page is somebody's actual sales record.
Titles, prices and a distributor's identity together are commercial information a real business compiled and owns as a document, even where no single title on it would be protected on its own. It's the same instinct as a shop's own handwritten pricing marks — a business's real paperwork, kept close rather than sold onward. Inventing the label, the titles and the prices keeps the format without touching anything that was actually somebody's stock list.
Does this format only work for records?
No — anything sold from a printed list with weeks between order and answer.
Mail-order seed catalogues, comic back-issue lists, model kit price sheets: the same gap between what's printed and what's actually still available runs through all of them. The circle and the hopeful margin note are what make any of those personal rather than generic.
Does it print well?
Yes, with one adjustment — the type needs to grow.
Ruled lines and a dense grid of small type are the kind of flat, high-contrast artwork that holds up on fabric, but a catalogue page's actual type size is set for reading at arm's length on paper, not at the size a shirt allows. Reducing the listing count keeps dense information legible at chest-print scale rather than letting it turn to grey noise. The biro circle and the margin note should stay close to their original scale — that's the part that needs to read as handwriting, not as print. Newsprint cream, oatmeal and a soft grey all suit it. One ink for the listings, a second for the handwriting.
How do I get one made?
Describe the page at JustOG — how many listings, what the heading says, and what's circled. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.
Designs other people have published are in the shop.
A padded envelope arrived weeks later, and it was the right one.