By Naomi Subotnick, WPAMC Class of 2022
Overview
Figure 1. Order form from Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog. From Sears, Roebuck and Company. Catalog No. 124. Chicago: Sears, Roebuck and Company, 1912. Winterthur Trade Catalogs, HF5466 S43b TC.
When Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck founded their mail-order company in 1886, they were responding to major changes in transportation and communication technologies. An expanding rail system was increasingly connecting the country, allowing retail items to be shipped to once-remote rural areas. The introduction of Rural Free Delivery in 1896 meant that rural Americans could now have goods shipped directly to their homes. Sears, Roebuck & Co. expanded rapidly, offering a wide selection of goods at standardized prices. The selection of merchandise was comprehensive: the 1897 catalog listed everything from general hardware and cutlery to groceries and musical instruments. Indeed, between 1908 and 1940, Sears even sold kit houses. By 1916, Sears was mailing more than 50 million catalogs yearly.
Mail order catalogs have generally been considered to be a category of trade catalog. Several scholars have documented the history of trade catalogs in the United States: Lawrence B.
Romaine’s Guide to American Trade Catalogs, 1744–1900 represents the foundational bibliography on the subject, and Theodore R. Crom has written about both European and American trade catalogs, dating the development of the form to the eighteenth century.¹ The more detailed studies of mail order catalogs tend to consider their social function over their form, positioning them as primary sources for histories of nineteenth-century American consumer culture. However, mail order catalogs do represent a distinct category of book: the particular circumstances of their development dictated the way in which they were designed and printed.
Examining a 1912 catalog from Sears, Roebuck & Co., one notices the soft adhesive binding and newsprint-like pages (Figures 2 and 3). This catalog had to be easily mailable: a soft binding and lightweight paper cut down on shipping costs, meaning that more information about merchandise could be included in the catalog. Because the items sold by Sears were purchased by consumers remotely, visual depictions needed to be as accurate as possible. As Richard Rovere notes, “one had to take it on faith that Sears Roebuck & Co. was more than a fiction. The pictures of the warehouses, the plausible addresses in large print and the testimonials of the bankers helped, but they did not establish the materiality, to say nothing of the reliability, of the merchants.”² In order to faithfully represent products and to build consumer trust, catalog images were engraved directly from photographs of the objects. The 1897 catalog assuaged the doubtful consumer: “Our illustrations and descriptions,” the catalog declared, “are such as will enable you to order intelligently; in fact, so that you can tell what you are getting as well as if you were in our store selecting the goods from stock.” A catalog entry for “Guitars of Guaranteed Quality” provides a detailed description of the item, even including a reproduction of the decorative inlay (Figure 4).
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Figure 2. Detail of catalog binding and weight. From Sears, Roebuck and Company.Catalog No. 124. Chicago: Sears, Roebuck and Company, 1912. Winterthur Trade Catalogs, HF5466 S43b TC.
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Figure 3. Detail of thin, newspaper-like paper used for the catalog. From Sears, Roebuck and Company.Catalog No. 124. Chicago: Sears, Roebuck and Company, 1912. Winterthur Trade Catalogs, HF5466 S43b TC.
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Figure 4. Guitars of Guaranteed Quality advertisements. From Sears, Roebuck and Company.Catalog No. 124. Chicago: Sears, Roebuck and Company, 1912. Winterthur Trade Catalogs, HF5466 S43b TC.
The volume of catalogs being printed by Sears meant that their production was as efficient and streamlined as possible. A promotional pamphlet issued by the company in 1916, titled A Visit to Sears, Roebuck and Co., gives some sense of the printing process. The pamphlet aimed not only to make transparent the shipping process but also to convince the consumer of its revolutionary efficiency and scope. Here one could see pictures of the mail opening department, the correspondence department, and the grocery stockrooms, all populated by uniformed employees. “No sooner is one edition ready for the presses than copy is being prepared for the next edition,” proclaimed the pamphlet. Catalog production was centralized in one building: after being formatted on a Linotype machine, the type forms were then sent to an electrotype foundry, and printed on rotary presses (Figures 5 and 6). Four-color process printing presses were used to create color images. The printed sections were then bound and covered before being mailed directly to consumers (Figure 7).³ “To get an idea of the tremendous output of the Printing Building,” the pamphlet proudly explained, “the yearly product in Big Catalogs alone, if the catalogs were placed end to end, would stretch 1,000 miles; or if placed one on top of the other, they would make a pile more than 150 miles high.”
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Figure 5. Colortype presses and electrotype foundry works, from Sears, Roebuck and Company. A Visit to Sears, Roebuck and Co. Chicago: Sears, Roebuck and Company, 1916. Winterthur Trade Catalogs, HF5466 S43v 1914 TC.
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Figure 6. Press room photos with rotary presses, from Sears, Roebuck and Company. A Visit to Sears, Roebuck and Co. Chicago: Sears, Roebuck and Company, 1916. Winterthur Trade Catalogs, HF5466 S43v 1914 TC.
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Figure 7. Photos of binding the catalog, from Sears, Roebuck and Company. A Visit to Sears, Roebuck and Co. Chicago: Sears, Roebuck and Company, 1916. Winterthur Trade Catalogs, HF5466 S43v 1914 TC.
The Sears catalogs were not only retail encyclopedias — they were also advertisements. A great deal of attention was paid to making objects look attractive to the consumer: image and text were appealingly coordinated. In an advertisement for “The Piccadilly” suit from the 1912 catalog, a man steps deftly across the page towards the viewer, confidently crossing the printed red border around him (Figure 8). A page from the same catalog advertising “Veils and Motor Scarves” depicts not only the items being sold, but also gives some suggestions about how to style these garments (Figure 9).
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Figure 8. Full color advertisement for a new men's suit, "The Piccadilly." From Sears, Roebuck and Company. Catalog No. 124. Chicago: Sears, Roebuck and Company, 1912. Winterthur Trade Catalogs, HF5466 S43b TC.
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Figure 9. Many different veils and "motoring scarves" for sale. From Sears, Roebuck and Company. Catalog No. 124. Chicago: Sears, Roebuck and Company, 1912. Winterthur Trade Catalogs, HF5466 S43b TC.
Like other mail-order companies, Sears was not only selling goods, but also a consumer experience. With its beautifully rendered images and exciting descriptions, leafing through the catalog as enjoyable. More importantly, it reminded readers that they had immediate access to a wide variety of retail goods. Contained within the pages of the Sears, Roebuck & Co. mail-order catalogs was the promise of material availability, an aspirational consumer lifestyle, and an accompanying faith in the technologies that had made it possible.
Diagram of a Sears Roebuck Catalog
Glossary of Terms
A pliable binding strong enough to keep all the pages together while remaining lightweight enough to minimize shipping costs
An unspoken understanding between consumer and company that quality goods will be delivered in good condition, and that items are depicted accurately in catalog descriptions
Description of the item being offered, accompanied by a picture
A listing at the beginning of the catalog of all goods offered, organized alphabetically by category
A form included in the catalog, to be filled out by the consumer and sent back to the company with specifications for items to be shipped
A physical location where goods were stored before being shipped to customers
Annotated Bibliography
Provides a history of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century catalogs, as well as information about where some are housed. Crom’s book contains many useful illustrations and reprints of early trade catalogs. Although it provides more information about the history of European, and especially British, catalogs, Crom’s research provides an important genealogy of the trade catalog form.
A comprehensive history of Sears, Roebuck & Co., intended to contribute to scholarship
on American economic history. Somewhat dated in its discussion of westward expansion and
business strategies, but nevertheless an important resource for detailed information about the
company.
Originally published in 1909, Graydon’s 1921 book is a transcript of his 1909 talk at the Technical Publicity Association of New York. Meant to be a guide to advertisers, the book covers such topics as typography, illustrations and engravings, composition, and paper quality. Graydon’s book is valuable for understanding twentieth-century attitudes towards print advertising, which may have influenced the designers of the Sears catalogs.
A guide to Winterthur’s collection of trade catalogs, including broadsides, broadsheets, pamphlets, manuscripts, and books issued by businesses and the public for the purposes of merchandising. McKinstry’s guide is organized into thirty subject categories, many of which were first used by Lawrence Romaine in his Guide to American Trade Catalogs, 1744–1900.
A promotional pamphlet meant to guide the reader through the company’s Chicago headquarters. Included is a valuable description of the process of printing the mail-order catalog. The language and tone of the pamphlet are meant to awe the reader, and to emphasize the unique ability of the company to deliver any item at any time.
Originally published in 1960 (New York: R.R. Bowker Company), Romaine’s guide was based on his own personal collection and remains a foundational bibliography of American trade catalogs. Romaine’s guide is organized into sections devoted to such topics as architecture, booksellers, printers’ supplies, scientific and industrial instruments, and seed catalogs. His extensive collection of nineteenth and early twentieth century materials is housed at The University of California, Santa Barbara.
Notes
[1] Theodore R. Crom, Trade Catalogues, 1542 to 1842 (Florida: Storter Printing Company, 1989), 5. Most scholars identify the first example of an American trade catalog to be Benjamin Franklin’s 1744 illustrated pamphlet advertising his new stove. However, according to Romaine, this was likely not the only American trade catalog produced before 1750, but rather the only one that has been preserved. Prior to around 1830, Crom notes that trade catalogs were not widely used in the United States, although he does identify some catalogs advertising drugs and scientific instruments. Romaine also identifies booksellers as early users of the catalog format.
[2] Richard Rovere, “A Mirrored Image,” introduction to 1897 Sears Roebuck Catalogue, Sears, Roebuck and Company (Reprint: New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1968), xvii.
[3] A Visit to Sears, Roebuck and Co. explains that “the trimmings [from the catalogs] alone amount to 2,200 tons a year and they are conveyed from the machines by blowers which shoot them into a packing plant on the railroad side of the building, where they are baled by machinery and sold as a by-product.” It would be interesting to explore whether there were other byproducts of the printing process, and if so, how they may have been used.
