An Ode to the Big Book

By Paul Gray

IT WAS AN ANNUAL AND UNFAILingly upbeat report on the American horn of plenty. All this stuff for sale, more in heaven and earth than was dreamt of in even the maddest consumer's philosophy: buggy whips and barbering aids, covered wagons and canaries, tires and trousseaux, countless doodads that seemed unnecessary until they popped up on the page. From the Sears catalog, known affectionately as the "big book," customers could order everything necessary to equip a house: furniture, appliances, rugs, cooking and eating utensils and paint. Between 1908 and 1937, they could also order the house itself. All told, Sears sold 100,000 prefabricated models, and most of them are still standing and occupied today. Some of the items advertised in the early years seem, well, unseemly now. Before the Food and Drugs Act of 1906, the catalog listed a number of dubious medicinal aids, including laudanum, a notoriously addictive, opium-based headache remedy and sedative. Pistols and rifles were aggressively marketed for years. The big book luxuriated in excess. Who had ever thought of buying a car by mail? The 1910 catalog offered an automobile called a motor buggy -- manufactured by Sears -- for $395. Never has the tent of U.S. commerce seemed more gloriously, wastefully overstocked than it did when portrayed on the pages of the Sears catalog.

By current standards, it ranked low in user-friendliness. For most of its 97 years, the big book did not offer home-delivery service. People who wanted to purchase something listed could mail in their order but then had to journey to a place populous enough to sustain a Sears store or catalog center to pick it up. No use making a call. Only last year did 800-number operators start standing by, ready to take orders day and night; the big book, after all, was born when customers had no telephones. And such updated procedures, for all their added charms to the busy users, robbed the catalog of a certain gravitas. At its bulky, clunky, inconvenient best, the big book was both a commercial bonanza for its parent company and a moral force in American life. It discouraged impulse buying and promoted the educational benefits of travel.

Sears' announcement last week that its 1993 catalog, all 1,556 pages of it, would be the last probably didn't mean much to couch potatoes cradling their Touch-Tone phones while watching the Home Shopping Network on cable. But for most people over a certain age -- say 35, maybe 40 -- the news was slightly unnerving. Even those who hadn't seen the big book since their childhood recognized a loss, not necessarily of a shopping aid but of an innocence and optimism and simplicity of desire that the catalog both thrived on and fed.

For willing buyers were not the only ones stirred by the yearly arrival of the book. Founder Richard Warren Sears' best marketing insight was to aim the catalog at rural America, where, throughout much of the 19th century, roughly 70% of the people lived. Never mind being unable to window-shop like their city cousins; many of these potential customers were looking for a place to buy inexpensive windows.

So the big book regularly found its way into pockets of isolation -- geographic or social -- where it provided a view of the world beyond the village green, the town intersection, the empty horizon. Its reach and destinations made it an early form of mass entertainment, unencumbered by competition of any sort. It was thus a book of revelations. So this is what people who work in offices are wearing. That is what an up-to-date kitchen is supposed to contain. And this is what ladies look like in their underwear. It mattered little that the line-drawn lingerie ads stressed upholstery rather than allure. They were the closest thing to printed erotica that many households ever saw; they taught boys -- and girls too, for that matter -- a little about what adulthood had in store.

The catalog appealed directly to people eager for genteel refinements -- bathtubs, butter knives -- but wary of sophistication. The big book once ran verse about itself on its cover. Typically, the commission had gone to Edgar A. Guest, America's most easily understood poet. Guest began, "I know the markets of the earth and wondrous tales I tell/ Of all the new and pretty things the whole world has to sell." The Sears catalog was not the place to go in search of the avant-garde.

This resolute, unswerving squareness constituted the big book's greatest charm and its lasting value as a record of middle-class American life. The Sears catalog assumed, correctly for nearly a century, that there were millions and millions of people out there who all wanted roughly the same sort of things, who all aspired to lead similar kinds of lives. Such conformism has received a thorough drubbing from writers and intellectuals. But the big book and the masses who used it provided a core, a cohesiveness to a new, developing, expanding society. The values were material, to be sure. An important side effect was stability: the planting of roots, fence posts, major appliances, heavy investments in the present and future.

The catalog may have been undone by economics, but changing tastes played a role as well. Hardly anyone admits to being a rube anymore. The U.S. is well on its way to becoming a nation of hipsters, looking for designer labels rather than inexpensive, durable goods. The American marketplace has splintered into specialty shops and glossy mini-catalogs hawking their wares. Faux outdoorsy types consult L.L. Bean; those interested in bedroom costumes turn to Victoria's Secret. The big book's children finally devoured their parent.

Still, as serials go, it had a terrific run. The catalog was never long on plot. But it was generous, munificent, in its details.