I added a category for Department Store Catalogs to the Skate and Annoy galleries. Right now there’s only 10 catalogs spanning 19964-1966. The biggest reason is (my OCD) I took it upon myself to also ad images of the skateboards found in those ads, which turned out to be quite time consuming. I plan on continuing this through the 70’s, but as soon as they get impossible to identify I’ll probably stop adding the real life photos. Check out Department Store Catalogs.
The majority of these came from a site called christmas.musetechnical.com that is built in a strange way that doesn’t allow you to link directly to the pages or even the individual catalogs they were found in. The pages on the watermarks don’t always match up with the actual catalog pages because the watermarks are rigidly sequential and don’t account for things like pages with numbers like 52-A, or 52-B etc… The scans are mostly not-so-great, with a lot of compression, so until I can find alternatives, that’s the best it gets. Wishbookweb.com used to have some online as well, but the site is broken and nobody seems to have noticed.
I did overpay for a really nice single page from the 1965 Montgomery Ward Christmas Book, because it’s a full-page color ad featuring Montgomery Ward branded skateboards. It turns out I already had another page on S&A that isn’t in the Musetechnical site. It’s a 2010 post for a Sears catalog page in color and allegedly from 1965 but I can’t tell. It doesn’t show up on the Sears catalogs Musetechnical, before and after 1965. Skateboards pretty much disappear from catalogs after 1966 until 1975. Apparently back in 2010 I was trying to track it down on Ebay but it was too expensive. Unfortunately I didn’t make a not of which catalog and date it was. For example Sears should sometimes put out 4 catalogs in any given year. If you know where/when it’s from, please contact me.
The catalog taxonomy includes, parent company, year, decade, and skateboard brands. There only 10 form the 60’s up there right now, but I’ve source approximately 90 more that range from 1975-1999. They tend to get a lot less interesting as time marches on.
Still reading this? check out the Department Store Catalog gallery.
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