> Phony Stark
> Free speech

Pick one.

Holy shit! They've also started a scheme wherein people who bought things like watches or jewellery are advised to send in their broken things to the actual original seller (SR& Co.) instead of trying to fix them themselves, to use the "proper materials" and not whatever they had at hand!
Proprietary fucking materials! 😆 Don't fix it where you are, send it in and hope it doesn't take forever and doesn't get lost on the way!

Hecking heck. At least they didn't FORBID repair by anyone but them.

God I love these. There's an ad for a heavy duty laundry machine, for "lace curtains, carpets, horse blankets, rugs, or bed clothes - as easily as ordinary clothes."
The ad shows a large cylindrical vat contraption on legs with very large and ornate manufacturer's branding. And what, you may ask, is funny about this? Well, it's shown to be used (with presumably boiling hot water!) by a little girl who is not very much taller than the vat.
"See! The washing is finished and the Little Maid has done it all by herself!"

Amazing. Domestic child labour and endangerment and clean rugs all at once.

Oh. 😆 Oh no! This is from the 1902 Spring catalogue because the reprint was only 200 pages long:
"YOU CAN MAKE MONEY by selling watches, etc. For when you can buy them for the same, or less money than the retail dealer who sells on from 30 to 100 per cent profit and has large expenses in the way of rent, clerk hire, fuel light, etc, you can readily see that you could undersell him and still make a handsome profit for yourself."

Resell scammers! They existed in 1902! It's so funny and I hate it!

There's also an entire page of "Secret Society and Emblem charms" and I have no idea what half of the ones on display are, but, should you want to look at them here's a link to that specific page that should maybe work:
archive.org/details/sears-roeb…

I don't know how ordinary these were for the time but I definitely did not expect to see them, lol.

I don't know how secret your society is if you can buy trinkets for them in the hecking Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogue, but there they were, I guess.

If I ever run another Call of Cthulhu game I am *definitely* putting in an eldritch mail order catalogue. 😂

(I swear I'll do and post about other things at some point, but!)

In the early 1900s there was that chicken craze. Breeding fancy chickens was an acceptable pastime and a fad. I'm unsure of when using brooders instead of actual chickens to hatch your eggs became a thing, but I'd assume it happened between 1897 and 1902, since this catalogue has a whole array of brooders for all your egg hatching needs.
Did the tech become available because of the fad, or the tech becoming available make the fad take off? I don't know, but it's interesting.

Also banquet lamps, which were not present in the 1906 catalogue.
I don't know if they're anything other than lamps that are pretty and that you can have to make your lamps look nicer than the lamps the neighbour or your nemesis-bestie has. For reference, it's $5.65 and a couple of pages later you can buy a fancy pram for a baby for 7 dollars...

#Histodons

Oh my god. 🤣 Every time... Like. First, you have to understand how Absolutely Meticulous all the arranging of the paragraphs, different items, the text, titles, images and everything is. Clearly a lot of time was spent on putting this thing together.

And then we get ads for some wheelchairs - Right next to the Memorial Department, with tombstones!
"Nana or injured uncle Stephen having trouble walking, eh? Well, no fear, here's a chair! And in a little while, these handsome markers! You don't even have to tell anyone they're from the Sears catalogue!"

Meanwhile, I have a deep need.
I can't believe this is a toy that was sold and that it's so beautiful and such a weird shape, and apparently you can still find original ones that work? To sew with?? What a fantastic fucking apparatus, truly.
Here's the original ad and then a random auction photo, I typed in the entire text in the alt text if you need it to read it!

#SewingMachines #Sewing #Histodons

Furthermore, I was so taken with the functional sewing machine that it took some time for me to notice the FOUR STEAM ENGINES right next to it. For children! Steam engines, for children!
With boilers, whistles and safety valves! At least one of them burns alcohol. Made of brass, steel and iron, "thoroughly tested".

I have to say, children's toys were significantly more rad in the early 1900s than they are today. Of course, they might also explode on said kids, but...