Kinsler column: Who remembers flipping through a Sears, Roebuck and Co catalog?
It’s not 1939 outside. But this unfortunate date (see above) hasn’t prevented me from perusing, in some detail, the Fall-Winter catalog from Sears, Roebuck and Co. They are perhaps my only costly vice: my tattered collection includes modern reprints from 1890, 1897, 1900, 1902, 1908, and 1927, plus real catalogs from 1933, 1939, 1946, and 1958, typically purchased through eBay.
My love of catalogs isn’t new: the other day I was reading through the motorcycle section of the 1958 catalog and realized that I’d done the same thing with the same section of the same catalog in 1958.
A general merchandise catalog provides an unmatched window into history. It’s unfortunate that stories about old catalogs tend to concentrate on items we in this century would consider silly. But while times change, people do not: our house sheltered a bright, modern family when it was built in 1888. Want to know what people worried about 100 years ago? Check Sears’ lightning rod, veterinary, insurance and home-remedy sections.
And yes, Sears did sell heroin tablets for a short time, but you can buy fentanyl in Lancaster now.
An old catalog is a historical novel minus a plot, but fascinating nonetheless. Look at a street scene from 1900: the women wore long skirts — elegant, but they reached the floor. Solution? You’d buy a few yards of long thin brushes and sew them, bristles down, to the hem. These would wear forever and protect your velour from the insults of Victorian pavement.
Cars didn’t have heaters, but there were pages of lap robes. Fur coats were available in dog skin. And how gloomy could the early 1900s have been if Sears listed 5 pages of mandolins, and gaily-striped refreshment tents for fairs, and four pages of fishing rods?
My collection has notable gaps. Automobiles went unmentioned in 1908 but 11 years later dominated the 1927 catalog. The Great Depression starred in the 1933 catalog, and World War II in 1946, when almost everything was out of stock. And ignore prices: $1.00 in 1930 = $17 in 2022.
Those convinced that the world as we know it is ending may take solace in old catalogs, Wars may come and go, but there will always be a need for 9” aluminum cake pans (see page 1049.) Maybe that’s why I like them.
Mark Kinsler, kinsler33@gmail.com, lives in a rather crowded old house in Lancaster under the watchful eye of the two striped cats plus Natalie, who claims she loves me anyway.
This article originally appeared on Lancaster Eagle-Gazette: Who remembers flipping through a Sears, Roebuck and Co catalog?
