'Selling It,' the book.(Memo To Members)(Editorial)(Product Announcement)

On the back of editor Leslie Ware's office door hangs a severed steering wheel. Locked on to the steering wheel is The Club. That's the antitheft device that's supposed to make it difficult for thieves to steal your vehicle. "If you want to keep your car, Club it," said the TV ad. Unless, that is, you're the New York CONSUMER REPORTS reader who went out to the street to find his car gone, except for the steering wheel--complete with still-locked Club--which was sitting in the empty parking space. He sent the evidence to us.

The steering wheel is just one of thousands of items readers have sent over the years to the editors of "Selling It," the CONSUMER REPORTS column on the magazine's inside back cover that memorializes the excesses of marketing. Since the first "Selling It" appeared, in 1977, readers have faithfully mailed in up to 300 items a month. Tubes of toothpaste, boxes of cereal, bottles of cologne, car ads, dried-soup mix, deodorant, pineapple-guava-mango juice--we never know what will be inside the next box.

"Selling It" has an extremely loyal following. "Like many a reader, I am certain, I read my eagerly awaited issue of CR backwards--first always looking at the 'Selling It' page, then the rest of the magazine," wrote one reader. Recently, another asked whether we had plans to expand "Selling It" into a book.

Good news: "Selling It: The Incredible Shrinking Package and Other Marvels of Modern Marketing" (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, $15.95) is due in bookstores at the end of January. Ware, current editor of the column, has pulled together some of the funniest and weirdest examples and wrapped them in a breezy overview of marketing, from the first ad published in English--in 1477, for a "good chepe" book--to a list of places to call if you feel that you've been ripped off.

Ware's own favorites? Jogging ...