An Eye for Winners, An: How I Built One of America's Greatest Direct-Mail Businesses--And So Can You

From the Publisher

It Took $2,000 And A Dream: The Inspiring Story Of How One Woman Built A Multi-Million Dollar Company

"I never gave much credence to conventional wisdom or common prejudices. My family needed a little more money. I had an idea about how to make some."

In 1951, Lillian was a young homemaker, pregnant with her first child. Like most other couples of that time, she and her husband were struggling to make ends meet. But Lillian had something that most other young women did not-she had an idea for earning money at home and she had the determination to bring that idea to fruition. Armed with nothing more than her intuition, optimism and $2,000, she launched a two-product mail-order business. By 1996, her business had sales of $238 million. Lillian Vernon Corporation-named after the town where she started her business, Mount Vernon, New York-remains a leader in the mail-order industry, and Lillian stands out as an entrepreneur of extraordinary acumen.

An Eye for Winners: How I Built America's Greatest Direct-Mail Business is a "dual biography," interweaving the account of her corporation's unprecedented growth with Lillian's own personal story; both are filled with ups and downs, triumphs and trials. Told in Lillian's own voice, the book takes readers behind the scenes and introduces the people-her family, employees, and most of all, her customers-who helped shaped the way she does business. It reveals the secrets-from her innate ability to choose what her customers want, to her steadfast dedication to creating catalogs that bear her own spirit and taste that have won her the loyal patronage of 18 million customers. Supplementing the narrative, Lillian provides a primer for other entrepreneurs that covers all the basics of starting and running a business, including calculating start-up costs, working at home, structuring a business, developing a customer base, keeping track of budgets, and weighing the advantages and disadvantages of rapid growth. There are even tips on how to find the product or service that will prove irresistible to potential customers.

Lillian brought to her personal life the same indomitable spirit that helped her ride out economic cycles and survive the many surprises involved in buying, warehousing, and shipping a vast inventory. In poignant detail, she describes the difficulties she and her parents faced as immigrants from Nazi Germany and writes movingly of her lifelong attempts to win her mother's approval and love. She candidly discusses the toll her ambition and her business took on her personal life, including two marriages, and the difficulties of working with family. She discusses the problems she faced as a woman in a field dominated by men and of her feelings of annoyance and outrage at the condescension she received at trade shows and from manufacturers. But, she also shares the joys-the encouragement her father unceasingly gave her, the business contacts who helped her through the hard times and became dear friends, the loyal employees who have become like family, the loving man who has recently come into her life, and the satisfactions she now enjoys through her involvement in a variety of charitable and cultural activities.

Lillian Vernon is a pioneer in the mail-order business and in her simply told story readers will discover a vast amount of information about an industry that now commands more than $70 billion dollars a year in sales. They will discover, too, an extraordinary woman who managed to balance the myriad responsibilities of a multi-million dollar business with the demands of a family.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lillian Vernon is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Lillian Vernon Corporation. She serves on the boards of numerous non-profit organizations, including Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, City Meals on Wheels, and the White House National Business Women's Council. The winner of several humanitarian and business awards, she lives in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Customer Reviews:

A quick but informative read.......2003-03-20

Apparently there is a lot more to home business than meets the eye. Lillian Vernon's story illustrates the challenges and exhilarations she faced juggling her business, personal and family relationships. This book is a good overview of a personal success story, from the point of view of a woman who was only looking to earn a little extra cash and instead amassed an empire.

The article posted was inspiration enough, done very well........1998-06-06

The book maybe a fantastic voyage of discovery into not just mail-order, but into discovering fulfilment for all those desirous of doing so. Lilian Vernon has subtly personified what many men & women aspire to be and do. It's commendable what the indomitable spirit of a human being when pushed that bit harder can achieve.

I highly recommend this book. Great inspiration for me........1997-02-19

From the beginning, I was hooked. Excellent reading. Inspiring for anyone wishing to start their own business or is a business owner. As a small mail order business owner, I found this book to be a good look at what it takes to be an entreprenuer as well as some of the difficulties that we (as business owners) often face. Becky McAllister, BBB, Lt

An Eye for Winners How I Built One of America's Greatest Direct-mail Business

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An Eye for Winners How I Built One of America's Greatest Direct-mail Business
Lilliam Vernon
Manufacturer: Harper Audio
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio Cassette
ASIN: B000O8UP94

Product Description

The Book on two cassettes

Book Description

Relive the thrill of 24 years in the career of the fabled "Georgia Peach"-one of the greatest, most colorful, and simply larger-than-life baseball players who ever lived. Arranged in a visually exciting scrapbook format, packed with pictures and memorabilia that illustrate every significant date and more than 800 games, it takes you from April 26, 1904, when the 17-year-old Tyrus Raymond Cobb stepped up to the plate for the first time professionally, till his final turn on the field in 1928. The focus is on his playing, rather than on his oft-discussed personality and private life, with commentary culled from contemporary accounts that reveal how Cobb's swift throwing arm and fine batting skills contributed to every game. A generous sampling of photographs, cartoons, and ads from the period-many not seen since their original publication-provides a rare and enlightening vision of this ever-intriguing hero of baseball.

Customer Reviews:

Ty Cobb's Scrapbook.......2002-12-26

It was a refreshing look from a contemporary view of this fasinating era of baseball. Crammed full of interesting pictures. The Author certainly portrays Cobb as a baseball player extroadinaire. This book adornes my coffee table and is great for sneaking in a quick look from the "Deadball area."

Book Description

These two screenplays by James Mangold are the bases of two stylistically different films that both demonstrate his powerful sense of character and place. CopLand, which stars Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro, has as its protagonist a small-town New Jersey cop (Stallone) who has for years looked the other way when fellow officers have run roughshod over law and order-and who now is unwilling to do so one more time. Heavy stars Liv Tyler in her debut role as a young waitress who becomes the obsession of the overweight, lonely young man who owns the rural bar where she works. Both films are imbued with sympathy for their deeply flawed characters and rooted in a strong feeling for the reality of life in small-town America.

20 Black-and-White Photographs

Book Description

In The Wedding Complex Elizabeth Freeman explores the significance of the wedding ceremony by asking what the wedding becomes when you separate it from the idea of marriage. Freeman finds that weddings—as performances, fantasies, and rituals of transformation—are sites for imagining and enacting forms of social intimacy other than monogamous heterosexuality. Looking at the history of Anglo-American weddings and their depictions in American literature and popular culture from the antebellum era to the present, she reveals the cluster of queer desires at the heart of the "wedding complex"—longings not for marriage necessarily but for public forms of attachment, ceremony, pageantry, and celebration.

Freeman draws on queer theory and social history to focus on a range of texts where weddings do not necessarily lead to legal marriage but instead reflect yearnings for intimate arrangements other than long-term, state-sanctioned, domestic couplehood. Beginning with a look at the debates over gay marriage, she proceeds to consider literary works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Vladimir Nabokov, and Edgar Allan Poe, along with such Hollywood films as Father of the Bride, The Graduate, and The Godfather. She also discusses less well-known texts such as Su Friedrich’s experimental film First Comes Love and the off-Broadway, interactive dinner play Tony ‘n’ Tina’s Wedding.

Offering bold new ways to imagine attachment and belonging, and the public performance and recognition of social intimacy, The Wedding Complex is a major contribution to American studies, queer theory, and cultural studies.

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Battlesystem Skirmishes Miniature Rules (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition)
Bruce Nesmith
Manufacturer: Wizards of the Coast
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Puzzles & Games | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
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Battlesystem: Miniatures Rules (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons)

ASIN: 1560761415

Book Description

Squid is the most popular Web caching software in use today, and it works on a variety of platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows. Squid improves network performance by reducing the amount of bandwidth used when surfing the Web. It makes web pages load faster and can even reduce the load on your web server. By caching and reusing popular web content, Squid allows you to get by with smaller network connections. It also protects the host on your internal network by acting as a firewall and proxying your internal web traffic. You can use Squid to collect statistics about the traffic on your network, prevent users from visiting inappropriate web sites at work or school, ensure that only authorized users can surf the Internet, and enhance your privacy by filtering sensitive information from web requests. Companies, schools, libraries, and organizations that use web-caching proxies can look forward to a multitude of benefits. Written by Duane Wessels, the creator of Squid, Squid: The Definitive Guide will help you configure and tune Squid for your particular situation. Newcomers to Squid will learn how to download, compile, and install code. Seasoned users of Squid will be interested in the later chapters, which tackle advanced topics such as high-performance storage options, rewriting requests, HTTP server acceleration, monitoring, debugging, and troubleshooting Squid. Topics covered include:

Compiling and installing Squid
Running Squid
Using Squid's sophisticated access controls
Tuning disk storage for optimal performance
Configuring your operating system for HTTP interception
Forwarding Requests to other web caches
Using redirectors to rewrite user requests
Monitoring Squid with the cache manager and SNMP
Using Squid to accelerate and protect HTTP servers
Managing bandwidth consumption with Delay Pools

Customer Reviews:

If you only get one book on Squid, ..........2007-08-12

then get this one. I learned enough about the reasons for using it and also how to configure it to authenticate against an LDAP server.

Well worth getting and keeping on your shelf.

Guides this good are extremely rare.......2006-01-14

This guide will pay for itself many times over. If you are considering a caching server for home, office or business you need this book.

My previous experience with proxies was MS proxy server 2.0 and I was a little apprehensive of this project; not to worry. Forty six pages into the book, squid was running; total time invested including installation of the program was about 2 hrs.

Another two hours of reading and precious few changes to config files and my log files are rotating, all ports I need exposed are open and the rest are hidden. I have already been able to tune squid to accelerate delivery of content using *only* this book as a guide. I haven't even had to look at the online documentation for squid (the first time I ever recall that happening).

Not only is my internet connection now available to all users, but also every one is browsing faster than they were before on single dedicated dial ups.

I can't say enough good things about the book or the program. In 14 years of networking I have seen the good, the bad and the ugly. This is one of those rare guides whose author is extremely knowlegable and the material presentation is flawless. I have a large computer science library and in my experience, it doesn't get any better than this.

Bravo Mr. Wessels!

This book is awesome!!!.......2005-01-28

For the new comer I recommend to buy this book if your finding an alternative for Microsoft box like ISA or MSProxy 2.0.

Squid is robost and a very stable Proxy Server, you can use it even in Entreprise consumption..trust me I use it since 2001.

If your looking for technical books or documents about Squid, this is the one your looking for...

"The" book for Squid.......2004-05-25

Squid: The Definitive Guide by Duane Wessels is a great book for someone with aspirations of setting up and getting the most out of Squid. It is lengthy at just over 400 pages, but that is to be expected and desired in O'Reilly's "The Definitive Guide" series. One point worth mentioning is that Duane Wessels (the author, for those with short synaptic cycles) is the one who started Squid and still works on it today. Each chapter builds nicely on subsequent chapters, so there isn't any skipping around. If you're just looking to set it and forget it, this book is probably not for you. Otherwise, read on.

The first three chapters are pretty basic: history of Squid, downloading then installing. For those with no concern of going through downloading and installing, there is a nice section describing each configure switch and, while weighing in at a healthy 48 options, it may be helpful to have this as a reference.

Chapter Four, Configuration Guide For the Eager, is an often desired, but often left out chapter in technical books. By just reading chapters one through four, it is possible to have a fully functional setup of Squid, albeit not very secure or ready for the pounding of the masses. You will, however, begin to understand how Squid operates. This chapter discusses the most often used settings, such as: minimum/maximum size of cached objects, log files and ACLs to restrict addresses, etc.

Chapter Five, Running Squid, covers what you expect. It includes such topics as, boot scripts, chrooting and rotating log files. Again, basic stuff, but necessary for the sake of completeness.

Chapter Six, All About Access Controls, covers one of Squid's major powers and attractions, access controls. ACLs give the administrator extremely fine-grained tuning. Some of the choice highlights for limiting access to addresses/domains include, but not limited to: filter by subnet, MAC, IP address or administrator assigned group. Furthermore, regular expressions can be used to filter URLs or URIs. A most likely seldom used, but very cool, feature is the ability to filter by BGP AS (Border Gateway Protocol Autonomous System) numbers. HTTP request methods such as POST, PUT, DELETE, etc. can also be filtered. Filtering by time or restricting access by user name is also supported. Each topic is assiduously explained and leaves little to be desired.

Chapters Seven and Eight cover disk caching with chapter Seven being basic material and then Eight covering more advanced topics. Discussions on object pruning, size limits, cache replacement policies and many other cache optimizations are covered in these chapters and are necessary to thoroughly understand if you are situated in a relatively large environment or just want to squeeze every bit of performance from your Squid.

Chapter Nine, Interception Caching, covers transparent proxying. This chapter discusses the benefits (no need to configure clients) and drawbacks (cannot do user authentication) of implementing such a system. It then goes on to discuss how to configure Alteon/Nortel, Foundry, Extreme Networks, Arrowpoint, iptables, pf and ipfw to perform the routing to the Squid box.

Chapter ten, Talking to other Squids

Scalability is another favorable attribute of Squid. Running in parallel with previous chapters, this chapter details the advantages (load balancing and increasing your cache hits) and the disadvantages (security problems with having to trust neighboring Squids) of a caching hierarchy. In addition, it explains how to configure connect timeouts and other tweaks to keep Squids aware of when their siblings are down.

Chapter eleven, Redirectors, covers another great attribute of Squid. Redirectors can be used, among other possibilities, to remove advertisements in web pages or rewrite client requests based on their given URL or URI. This chapter details how they work, from a protocol level, and provides example configuration settings such as sending only specific users through the redirector or conversely, letting specific users bypass the redirector altogether.

Squid can be configured to use various user authentication methods to allow or deny access. Chapter Twelve, Authentication Helpers, covers these options. Squid can talk HTTP Basic, HTTP Digest and NTLM. Each type is well explained in how it works and detailed in how to setup.

Chapter Thirteen and Fourteen fully explain logging and monitoring. The logging chapter explains the type of information each log file catches, a full description of each error or information type (which is a great reference that I made full use of) and configuration directives that change what is logged or how it is logged. Monitoring Squid covers the Squid Cache Manger (A web front-end to many great statistics), a brief mention of using Squid-RRD and using SNMP. Such monitoring statistics include, file descriptor allocation, byte hit ratios, cache hits and cache misses and a wealth of other useful information.

Chapter Fifteen, Server Accelerator Mode, explains Server Accelerator Mode, which is also known as Surrogate Mode. It is a neat trick where Squid stills runs as a proxy, however, the Squid server is proxying the world (or a select few) to your server. One obvious advantage includes performance (or Slashdot hardening if you will). There are several config directives explained here as well as some gotchas.

Chapter Sixteen, Debugging, is the is one of the few chapters that I did not need to reference. Although, if you need to, there is some good information provided.

Appendix A comes with a config file reference that actually provides more information then the comments in the configuration file (Holy moley!...they better trademark that idea before other authors catch on!).

Appendix B briefly covers memory caching and optimization.

Appendix C shows how to use delay pools to limit user bandwidth.

Appendix D details file system performance benchmarks to show you filesystem and operating system differences.

Appendix E discusses running Squid on Windows using Cygwin.

Appendix F covers auto configuration of Squid clients to avoid needing to physically visit the many machines you administer.

In conclusion:

Pros: This is "The Book" for Squid. No skipping from chapter to chapter, the author was also the designer and still one of the maintainers, fuller descriptions of the configuration file directives that the configuration file comments. It is a great reference.

Cons: Really the only thing that I didn't like was that he only discussed HTTP proxying. There is a brief mention of FTP and SMTP, but only a couple of sentences. To be fair, in the preface he did mention that he would would of liked to written on these topics but didn't have time.

Well Worth The Wait.......2004-03-02

Back in 1998 when I was running my own ISP, Squid was a lifesaver because it allowed me to provide excellent web response to customers over a very modest upstream connection.

When I moved on to consulting Squid was the answer to a wide variety of client problems from employee Internet access control (Redirectors) to company website performance (Server Accelerator Mode) to plain old web page load times (Proxy Cache).

Now that I've moved in-house in a large corporation (30,000+ employees) and I've found out what commercial vendors are charging for their solutions to each of these problems, I have gladly used my knowledge of Squid to save us money.

Of course, that knowledge was not easily won, at least not for me. Because Squid was an open source project there was a lot of information available on the Web, but, of course, because Squid was an open source project, it was hard to find a definitive answer to my particular problem without asking a lot of dumb questions on newsgroups or making a lot of trial and error attempts tweaking compile time options, system changes and configuration file settings.

I have waited for this book for a long time.

I was concerned that it might be too detailed to be readable. Thankfully, Duane Wessels, the primary architect of Squid , has laid out this book to provide simple access at the Macro level. The chapter arrangement and organization are very intuitive. And yet the book still contains enough information to satisfy almost every question.

The one caveat I would make to a reader is to maintain situational awareness while delving into a chapter because, without noticing it, you can suddenly be confronted with pages and pages of configuration file details. There's no avoiding it, when a book says `Definitive Guide' on the cover you expect to have full coverage. It's just that the book is so lucidly written that the transition from high-level discussions to detailed facts might catch you un-aware.

And, really, it's that kind of feeling that lets you know that you're reading a very valuable text. I spent the first hour after I got this book skimming each chapter, happy at each additional topic I discovered. Then I went back and asked it the two hardest questions I have faced using Squid over the past year, in each case the answer was easily found and fully explained (Mr. Wessels deserves an award for making transparent proxying understandable).

Book Description

Behind every web transaction lies the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) --- the language of web browsers and servers, of portals and search engines, of e-commerce and web services. Understanding HTTP is essential for practically all web-based programming, design, analysis, and administration. While the basics of HTTP are elegantly simple, the protocol's advanced features are notoriously confusing, because they knit together complex technologies and terminology from many disciplines. This book clearly explains HTTP and these interrelated core technologies, in twenty-one logically organized chapters, backed up by hundreds of detailed illustrations and examples, and convenient reference appendices. HTTP: The Definitive Guide explains everything people need to use HTTP efficiently -- including the "black arts" and "tricks of the trade" -- in a concise and readable manner. In addition to explaining the basic HTTP features, syntax and guidelines, this book clarifies related, but often misunderstood topics, such as: TCP connection management, web proxy and cache architectures, web robots and robots.txt files, Basic and Digest authentication, secure HTTP transactions, entity body processing, internationalized content, and traffic redirection. Many technical professionals will benefit from this book. Internet architects and developers who need to design and develop software, IT professionals who need to understand Internet architectural components and interactions, multimedia designers who need to publish and host multimedia, performance engineers who need to optimize web performance, technical marketing professionals who need a clear picture of core web architectures and protocols, as well as untold numbers of students and hobbyists will all benefit from the knowledge packed in this volume. There are many books that explain how to use the Web, but this is the one that explains how the Web works. Written by experts with years of design and implementation experience, this book is the definitive technical bible that describes the "why" and the "how" of HTTP and web core technologies. HTTP: The Definitive Guide is an essential reference that no technically-inclined member of the Internet community should be without.

Customer Reviews:

Great product.......2006-02-25

Very clear & easy to understand / logical / informative / well planned

Truly Definitive.......2005-01-07

Here's my advice: review the book's contents (you'll need to visit O'Reilly's site at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/httptdg/). Do you need a complete understanding of the topics? If so, buy this book. Everything is clearly explained in detail, with the chapters on security and internationalization being especially good. Highly recommended!

Lots of Facts, Poor Focus.......2004-10-08

This book has much of interest, and reads easily, with lots of pictures and lots of repetition. But it probably served me better than it would have someone who came to it to learn to use HTTP in Web programming. I cared more about the overviews of routers and servers and such, and the conceptual issues involving HTTP -- what it is and how it works. But to actually use it I would want some examples -- even just one example. Instead, we get a couple of random programs -- a mini-server in PERL, and a C program that sets up an HTTPS session using the OpenSSL routines (which themselves remain undefined).

The book has interesting material, but much redundancy, and much irrelevancy (chapter 19 on publishing systems is particularly worthless). Several of the appendices seem just dumps of publicly-available web sites, or, what is worse, long selections from them. The authors are good, though, about pointing to various useful web sites at chapter ends and in the appendix. But what this book really should have done, while explaining general concepts, is provide detailed documented examples, involving various configurations of client, server, router, and so on, that would illustrate exactly how HTTP is used.

Best book on HTTP I've come across.......2004-09-01

This book is worth more than its weight in gold. The authors do a phenomenal job of describing the HTTP protocol in an interesting and accessible way. Throughout the book their immense experience with the protocol shines through. For anyone working in the field of web acceleration, caching, load balancing, etc, I can't recommend this book highly enough. BUY IT!

Manque d'information.......2004-03-29

Ce livre manque de contenu et l'auteur se répète beaucoup (ne vous laissez pas impressioner par le nombre de pages).
En fait, il y a beaucoup d'information assez générale, mais à mon avis pas suffisamment pour développer un serveur, par exemple.
En particulier, il n'y a pas d'information (ou presque!) concernant les POST. Un "oubli" quelque peu surprenant pour un ouvrage de cette envergure.
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Very few information about form submission.

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Ajax: The Definitive Guide
Anthony Holdener
Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Ajax builds on older technologies and techniques but reaches a tipping point where the results are new. This guide gives readers information on this new stage of Web development and reveals ways to apply Ajax solutions to classically difficult Web interface and structure issues.

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