Culture Watch

If Texas-headquartered Neiman Marcus is a barometer, then free-spending, large-living, fire-up-the-jet-we’re-headin’-for-Vegas Texas has matured. Or gotten in touch with an intellectually sensitive inner Texan.

The cultural buoy we’ve spotted is in Neiman’s new Christmas catalog. This is the ultra-high-end consumer goods inventory that doesn’t go to just any cowboy with a Visa card and a P.O. box. The Neiman catalog works the old-fashioned way: You earn it--by spending money like a Saudi prince.

Even without wide circulation, the catalog has become something of a Texas icon with items such as “his and her Jaguars--a car for him, a fur for her!” The idea is extravagance done Texas-size. So here’s the big change: To celebrate its 90th anniversary, Neiman is offering books.

The inspiration, said spokeswoman Ginger Reeder, came from a number of sources: a Wall Street Journal article on what an intelligent, curious man should read, the New York Public Library’s Books of the Century list and the success of Oprah’s book club.

This is the Neiman Marcus catalog and these are not your average titles: These are 70 first editions, in primo condition from Bauman Rare Books in New York, of works by such authors as Faulkner, Capote, Steinbeck and Salinger. Some are signed; some are still in the dust jackets.

So here we’ve got Neiman Marcus offering Hemingway, when it had been offering African safaris, “The Great Gatsby” to people who are the Great Gatsby. The only thing making this gift half-way Texas respectable is the price: $185,000, steep change even for J. R.