An illuminating view of the world as seen through the tinted lens of Hollywood’s most important chronicler of entertainment news and show business. Variety is not only a fascinating look at the history of entertainment as reported by the world’s most highly regarded commentator of show business news, it is also a history of American popular culture and a record of the influence and confluence of art, life, and Hollywood. Illustrated with hundreds of front pages, its articles chronicle everything from Debbie Reynolds’s opinions of 1960s youth to how Steven Spielberg and Jaws transformed the movie business. With new and archival photographs spanning Variety’s more-than-century-old archives, the book includes exclusive essays by a host of well-regarded artists about what Variety means to them, how Variety has impacted the entertainment industry, and what they felt like the first time they saw their names in Variety’s pages. Variety is a decade-by-decade documentation of such pivotal moments as the audience’s move from vaudeville houses to movie theaters, censorship, how Lucy and Desi changed the face of television, Walter Cronkite’s shaping of America’s view of the Vietnam War, the birth of the summer blockbuster, the game-changing technology of Jurassic Park and Avatar, and how the movies, television, and theater reflect society’s ever-changing social values and mores. The perfect gift for anyone who loves Hollywood, Variety is also a never-before-available look at the premier source of entertainment reporting.

The distinguished classicist William Fitzgerald examines the concept, value and practice of variety in Latin literature and its reception. He argues that variety was an important value in ancient aesthetic discourse and played a significant role in thinking about, among other things, nature, rhetoric, pleasure and empire. Fitzgerald explains how a discourse of variety passed from Latin writers into the post-classical world up to the modern age, in which words like choice and diversity have taken over its work, though with associative meanings that are much different."

First published in 1999, this book explores pint points, compares and dates the development of product differentiation and variety. This book also analyses’ how firms have embraced a variety of ways of efficiently managing this verity though production, the design of the product as well as in the relations with the suppliers and distributors.

Product proliferation has become a common phenomenon. Most companies now offer hundreds, if not thousands, of stock keeping units (SKUs) in order to compete in the market place. Companies with expanding product and service varieties face with problems of obtaining accurate demand forecasts, controlling production and inventory costs, and providing high quality and good delivery performance for the customers. Marketing managers often advocate widening product lines for increasing revenue and market share. However, the breadth of product line can also decrease the efficiency of manufacturing processes and distribution systems. Thus firms must weigh the benefits of product variety against its cost in order to determine the optimal level of product variety to offer to their customers. Academics and practitioners are interested in several fundamental questions about product variety. For instance, why do companies extend their product lines? Do consumers care about product variety? Will a brand with more variety enjoy higher market share? How should product variety be measured? How can a company exploit its product and process design to deliver a higher level of product variety quickly and cheaply? What should the level of product variety be and what should the price of each of the product variants be? What kind of 'challenges would a company face in offering a high level of product variety and how can these obstacles be overcome? The solutions to these questions span multiple functions and disciplines.