The late, great Stan Hollander was one of my heroes. He was a truly outstanding scholar and one of the nicest people you could meet. I only got to know him in his later years and, although he cut a somewhat unprepossessing figure, he was as sharp as a tack mentally. Heaven only knows what he was like in his prime. What's more, he was fount of wisdom on the history of marketing, where even the most innocuous query was sure to elicit an erudite, elaborate and entertaining anecdote or two. Stan's letters are works of art in themselves. The Collected Correspondence of Stanley C. Hollander would make a great marketing text.

To give you an idea of what I mean, let me take you back to my early academic days when I was preoccupied with the theories of retail change. Head full of cyclical conceptualisations of time - Toynbee, Spengler, Nietzsche, Vico etc. - I wrote Stan an impassioned letter concerning his famous JM paper "The Wheel of Retailing" It culminated, as I recall, in a preposterous statement to the effect: "Professor Hollander, what were you really thinking about when you wrote The Wheel?" 'I was thinking,' he replied, 'that it'd be nice to get published in the 'Journal of Marketing'!

One of my daughters, Holly, is named after the great man. "Stan" would've been a bit much, don't you think?