The son and nephew of the store’s three founders, Stanley Marcus has dedicated his life to searching the world for the finest it has to offer and bringing home much of it to Dallas to offer Neiman Marcus customers. He learned well his father’s lessons, including “There is never a good sale for Neiman Marcus unless it’s a good buy for the customer,” and that “there was a right customer for every piece of merchandise, and that part of a merchant’s job was not only to bring the two together, but also to prevent the customer from making the wrong choice.” Then he took those messages of quality and service and added entertainment, mixing a sparkling cocktail that has made Neiman Marcus famous around the world.

Even though Minding the Store and Quest for the Best were originally published in 1974 and 1979, respectively, they are still must-reads for anyone who has ever purchased a luxury product. Not only are they memoirs of a truly extraordinary life, they challenge the reader to develop more discriminating taste and demand nothing but the best.

Minding the Store is a personable, family portrait and history of Neiman Marcus peppered with anecdotes of outrageous customer demands (the man who used his Neiman Marcus credit card to post bail), the advent of the famous Neiman Marcus catalog and its spectacularly over-the-top gifts (his-and-hers camels or jet planes) and the development of retailing as theater (cultural Fortnights that turned the Dallas store into a collection of fine French shops).

Any fashion fan can appreciate the evolution of apparel captured here, from the establishment of ready-to-wear to the emergence of the mink coat and designer labels. Marcus recounts his brushes with and personal opinions about a who’s who of 20th century designers, including MadameVionnet, Coco Chanel, Christian Dior and James Galanos.

Of course, Stanley Marcus, or Mr. Stanley as he is still called affectionately by his friends and associates in the fashion industry, also helped shape consumer expectations of the finest furs in the 20th century and beyond. He recalls how he “set out to build younger and more fashionable” furs during the Depression years by using cloth coats as models for more up-to-date fur styles. He also adopted the strategy of offering to pay fur manufacturers more for better quality garments, a practice that discouraged them from making their usual shortcuts.

He helped established the “one price” for a fur garments. Previously (and at many stores today), customers expected to be able to bargain for a fur.

He also cut out the fur industry practice -- prevalent even today -- of kickbacks for his buyers. In Quest for the Best, he devotes an entire chapter to The Seduction of the Buyer and how various forms of payola and favoritism have conspired in retailing to prevent the customer from gaining access to the finest quality merchandise and selection. When training buyers, he would tell them, “If we should ever find that you have accepted payola in the form of a commission, you will be immediately terminated and we shall prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law.”

To his credit, Marcus also admits his own mistakes over the years, including in the area of payola. He recognizes that store management “get it in the form of cooperative advertising money from the manufacturers whose names are carried in the headlines or in the body of the copy... As one of the inventors of this device, some forty years ago, I have come to rue the day of my ingenuity, for ‘co-op money‘, as it’s called, has become a pernicious influence in retail advertising, often depriving the customer from seeing the best and the most newsworthy merchandise in advertisements.”

Quest for the Best will astonish the reader at the depth and breadth of Marcus’s knowledge of everything “The Best” in the world, from edible delicacies to cigars, hotels and business suits. Though it begins by bemoaning the death of elegance, it ends up offering readers excellent advice on how to educate themselves about the best, demand it and get it.

But Stanley Marcus and his books are not just about material aspirations. Minding the Store reminds us that art and culture and politics and retailing often blend for a sociological snapshot of the day. I was entranced by what could have been a perfectly mundane recollection of Stanley Marcus and his wife building their first house. Modern architecture fans, they turned to Frank Lloyd Wright, only to be dismayed by Wright’s opinion that they only needed the barest of bedroom cubicles, because they could sleep outside year-round in Texas. And according to Wright, they didn’t need closets at all!

Also amusing are the numerous occasions of Mr. Stanley angering the politically conservative Dallas establishment with his liberal Democratic views, resulting in angry letters and returned, chopped-up credit cards. Not so funny is his personal account of the poisonously charged atmosphere that hung over Dallas before President Kennedy was shot there.

Of the two books, Minding the Store is the most substantive, but both are engaging, entertaining and thought-provoking reads that are clearly written by someone with a Harvard education in literature. It is easy to see why Stanley Marcus is such a legend and his philosophies are still used to train Neiman Marcus personnel today.

“Mr. Stanley’s influence goes far beyond the fur business,” explains Terry Thornton, currently the associate divisional merchandise manager for furs and coats at Neiman Marcus. “The concepts of his books underscore the basics of retailing and lead newer retailers to the Principal of Business. When it is all said and done, Mr. Stanley’s focus on customer service and retailing as theater remain sound, whether it is e-commerce or bricks-and-mortar business.”

Thankfully Neiman Marcus is one of the few North American retailers that maintains the standards of quality and taste in furs established by Stanley Marcus.

Before he left for the Texas Book Festival, where he was honored with a Bookend Award Ceremony, Stanley Marcus took time for a phone interview with furs.com on November 13.

Furs.com: In your book Quest for the Best, you mourn the death of elegance and very fine quality. Do you believe it is still possible to find a very fine fur garment today?

Stanley Marcus: Everything’s relative. You can find anything if you’re persistent enough and know how to demand the best. The standards of the whole needle trade have declined due to mass merchandising of products. This is not entirely a negative; however, as part of the decline, from handkerchiefs to furs, came about in order to bring down prices so merchandise could be available to a greater number of people.

This also brought about price competition. It is inevitable that if you make a product with the objective of beating the market competition, you are apt to take out certain items that make a product better. In the needle trade, for example, as I mentioned in my book, every factory had a take out man responsible for seeing how much material could be taken out of a garment. I was always certain that merchandise was delivered to the store short of what we were shown in the showroom.

I don’t see any way of curing that with price competition. The customer is misled by price. I know very few fur garments today that have the very fine quality of the way they used to be made. But even then, there were some people who were better than others. Joe DeLeo was a stickler. Others did not have the finesse it took to make a coat better than the competition -- the extra time it took to turn a seam, the generous number of skins in a garment. Whatever number of skins he took to make a coat, we knew the competition was taking out some.

I can’t say there aren’t people today dedicated to making the ultimate, but throughout the whole apparel field there are very few.

Furs.com: What impact do you think the design and technology aspects of fur as ready-to-wear have had on the fur industry and the merchandising of its product?

Stanley Marcus: I think they can do some remarkable things with fur today. They took a cue from women and the way they dye their hair and produced some remarkable colors. But while many of these garments may look good, they might not be as good because manufacturers have put everything into their appearance alone. The quality underneath might not be as fine. There are not as many people in the needle trades today who can make a living doing things the best way possible.

Furs.com: What was the most luxurious fur you ever sold while working in the store?

Stanley Marcus: I would say a Russian barguzin sable. We went to Russia ourselves and bought the skins and then gave them to a manufacture to make the coat. We never made the coats ourselves, but we chose the manufacturer carefully. We gave him a certain number of skins and made sure he used that number in the garment. We always found that customers are willing to pay for quality. We also had commercial mink, or at least the standard $9,500 mink coat, but we had the mink that represented the ultimate for $15,000 and found that many people chose that one. When people can find the best and can afford it, they usually do prefer it.

Furs.com: What is the greatest number of fur garments you ever sold to a customer at one time?

Stanley Marcus: When I was active, one time I sold seven garments to a lady in one sitting. She was sort of a nut, though, and couldn’t make up her mind between the seven, so she took them all. That was a very unusual occasion.