'It’s hard for me to imagine my childhood without junk mail. I was a voracious reader, and that meant reading everything in sight, including the catalogues that seemed to turn up at our house every week. I read them at the dinner table, because I wasn’t allowed to read books during dinner. I wasn’t so much reading the junk mail as skimming, and sometimes I read it while watching my favourite shows, a respite from the relentless repetitiveness of TV ads.'