Circa '89 here in the UK there was a 400+ page book of shareware you could get by filling out a form in most magazines, the book then listed shareware by what it did and encouraged you to order a copy (for a modest fee to cover disk and postage fee) from them, with each order you'd receive the most recent copy of the book as well.
Most of the time I just used the book as a guide to what I could extract via bitftp email from ftp.funet.fi, but the book came in handy during holidays when I had no internet access.
Most of the time I just used the book as a guide to what I could extract via bitftp email from ftp.funet.fi, but the book came in handy during holidays when I had no internet access.