What would you pay for a top fashion insider's complete and illustrated brain dump of important designers, from A to Z? $50? $100?

How about $350?

That's what Taschen's recently released Fashion Designers A to Z goes for. And at 654 pages, it's not a bad deal. (You do the math.) Drawing from the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology's famous archives, the volume might be seen as a sort of dream closet of director and chief curator Valerie Steele, whom the Washington Post described as one of "fashion's brainiest women."

Mario's is the only store in Seattle that offers the weighty tome, and no, despite the weighty price tag, they don't expect to keep them around for long. Creative director Patrick Angus (who simply smiled sweetly when I accused him of trying to remake Mario's into a high fashion book store) tells me they've already sold a few of them.