'This Gigantic Kitchen Midden'

Relatives of my mother lived on a farm outside Olean, N.Y. We seldom went there but I remember a traumatically embarrassing episode associated with one such visit. I was twelve or thirteen and seated in the living room, perusing the Sears Roebuck catalogue. Specifically, I was studying the lingerie ads, what department-store elevator operators called “ladies’ foundations.” This was about as close to porn as I had ever experienced. 

My concentration was abruptly interrupted by a cackle of childish, triumphant laughter from my second cousin, age seven or eight. I don’t remember her exact words but they were along the lines of “You’re looking at naked ladies!” Not strictly accurate but I had been caught in a moment of reverie (involving, let me make it clear, only my eyes). I still remember the feeling of a hot, full-body blush.

 

In “Brower’s Delight,” the preface he contributed in 1968 to the reprint of the 1897 Sears Roebuck Catalogue (Chelsea House), S.J. Perelman writes:

 

“Take ladies’ corsets, for instance (an invitation I’m sure no red-blooded male will decline). No. 24810, a model known as ‘Exposition,’ is thus described: ‘Perfectly shaped and a fine fitting corset, equal to any retailed at 80 cents. Price, $0.40.” Could any late Victorian wolf, encircling his inamorata’s hourglass waist, ever have dreamed that the treasures in his grasp were packaged in forty cents’ worth of whalebone and cambric?”

 

The catalogue is illustrated with thousands of engravings, the sort of thing Max Ernst used in his collages. The lady modeling “No. 23649 A Stiff High Bust Corset,” for instance, is rather fetching. Leafing through it, you start seeing the Sears Roebuck catalogue as the analog precursor to Amazon. It's surprising how text-heavy it is. Some entries amount to miniature essays. Each page is filled with 5-point type. By today's standards, the prices are a gift. Along with the sex comes violence. You could buy – by mail, remember – a Remington breech-loading, double-barrel shotgun (10- or 12-gauge) for $22.50. The Defender revolver – “wood stock, full nickel plated, plain cylinder, 7 shot, 22 caliber, rim fire, 2½ inch barrel, weight 7 ounces, safe and reliable” – is listed at 68 cents.

 

Ten of the catalogues 786 pages are filled with books for sale, heavy on reference works. You can buy Macaulay’s five-volume History of England for one dollar; Thimm’s German Self-Taught, 20 cents; two volumes of Emerson’s Essays, 40 cents; George Eliot’s works in eight volumes, $3.25. These are the sorts of dusty, brown-paged sets you still see in used bookstores to this day. Dick’s Stump Speeches and Minstrel Jokes will cost you 40 cents, and here’s the pitch:

 

“Contains all the materials necessary for Minstrel Shows, providing Jokes, Gags, Conundrums and Funny Sayings for the end men, stilted remarks for the middle man, with Burlesque Sermons and Stump Speeches, choice Farces, Interludes and Negro Acts, in sufficient variety for a number of minstrel entertainments, warranted to ‘bring down the house’ every time.”

 

The index has more than six-thousand entries, prompting Perelman to note “every conceivable form of artifact, from autoharps to kraut cutters, from dulcimers to teething rings, from foot scrapers to feathered boas. One can well imagine some archeologist of the twenty-fifth century scratching his head . . . over this gigantic kitchen midden, vainly attempting to adumbrate a vanished civilization from its household machinery.”