Eleven New Catalogs Added to the Archive!!

It’s mid-March and I’m so excited to announce that today, no less than eleven new catalogs have been added to WishbookWeb!

They are (in order of year):

1948 Sears, 1959 FAO Schwarz, 1967 JCPenney, 1973 Canadian Simpson-Sears, 1975 Eatons, 1977 Sears, 1989 Sears, 1990 JCPenney, 1991 Sears, 1994 JCPenney, and the 1996 JCPenney.

The 1991 Sears Wishbook comes in at a whopping 806 pages, by far the largest of the Christmas catalogs currently found on the site.  With these new additions, the current count on the site stands at fifty-seven complete Christmas catalogs, amounting to 25,617 scanned pages!  Wow!

Head on over the The Catalogs page to check them out!

This latest batch of catalogs comes courtesy of WishbookWeb co-founder (and my good friend), Alan Angerbauer.  Alan’s been working on those scans for some time (they amount to his backlog going back over a year), so please don’t expect that we’ll be adding quite THIS much new content on a regular basis – today’s new catalog additions amount to 5,500 scanned pages!  Even so, we do hope to keep updating and adding to the archive on a regular basis.  I’ve got a good sized backlog of unscanned catalogs to get to here, myself.  So I’d better get back to work.  See you next time!   -Jason

15 Replies to “Eleven New Catalogs Added to the Archive!!”

  1. This website is so fantastic…thanks for all your hard work in creating this archive of old catalogs…can’t wait to hopefully see Canadian Eatons catalogs from the 60’s….thanks

  2. This is just the best site. If I want to relax and forget the world for awhile, this is where I head. The only problem is I sometimes don’t re-emerge till several hours later!

  3. Thank You so much for helping me relive my Christmas childhood memories. ……It was great and this sight make it seems as though it is still those times….Best Website Ever!

  4. Outstanding work! Thank you so much for your effort. I really enjoy looking through these old catalogs – so many memories. The presentation is also excellent. You’ve made my day!

  5. Oh my goodness! Love this site, thank you!
    Any plans to publish the regular Sears catalogues instead of just the Wishbooks?

    1. Annette,

      Thank you for the kind words – very glad that you’re enjoying the site.

      In response to your question, at the present time, the roadmap forward is to continue to add more holiday catalogs. One of my ambitions is to eventually have every published Sears Wishbook/Christmas Catalog hosted on the site, so there’s still lots of work to do on that front.

      That said, down the road adding the Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter catalogs would not be out of the question. It’s just not anywhere in the current planning stages.

      -Jason

  6. What a trip down memory lane! Thanks for all that you do to keep this archive alive and well! I spent countless hours as a kid pouring through these pages making my Christmas list, changing my list, editing my list, and then changing it again.

    Very nice to find others with a love for nostalgia!

    -Chris

  7. Thank you for all the hard work in creating and maintaining this terrific site. It brings me a little piece of my childhood every year, and that’s a wonderful gift. It’s like I’m back at my grandmother’s house, compiling my Christmas list.

  8. Hi, Jason.

    I’m just leaving a note to tell you about a problem I’ve had viewing the catalogs. I’ve visited here and spent hours in these catalogs for several years now — and recommended the site to a lot of other people. But recently, I have not been able to view the catalogs with the flip pages. Every time I come on here, the site tells me that I have to view them in the regular HTML because I don’t have Adobe Flash Player. But I do have the flash player. One time I finally gave up and hit the button that came up on here to download the player again, but that took me to a site that put some kind of malware onto my computer, and I had to take it to my computer tech to get it fixed.

    I’m not sure what’s going on. I have visited a couple other sites that have given me a window that said I needed to “Allow Adobe Flash Player” to work on that site, and I’ve hit the “Allow” button. But this site doesn’t offer me a button like that. It just says I don’t have the player and that I have to hit that button to download it new. No other site says I don’t have it. I can’t keep clicking to download the app again and again every time I come here. Do you have any ideas what the problem might be? At this point, I just don’t even try to view the catalogs anymore.

    Thanks for any help you might be able to give.
    Sandra

    1. Sandra,

      So sorry that you’re experiencing this issue. I’ve attempted to reproduce it here on my end, but have been unable to. When I have time (and my free time is very short as of late), I will dig deeper into things. That said, I’m not a coder and some of this stuff does elude my understanding.

      What I can tell you is that I am committed to investing a few hundred dollars back into the FlippingBook Publisher software soon. It is that software that allowed me to create the fippable and text searchable catalog interface. Once I have saved up enough to invest in that new version of the software and have purchased it, it will allow me to rid the requirement for Adobe Flash (which is certainly problematic). That might be a few months still to save the money (and then put a few dozen hours into converting the catalogs into the new HTML-5 format from Flash), but I am committed to getting there.

      So sorry for your troubles. If I discover the root cause or a solution before that, I’ll let you know. For now, it’s a mystery to me, and a frustrating one.

      Jason

  9. I love looking at your website. This are treasures. It is so fun to look thru the catalogs from the 60’s and see things I received as gifts. Thank you

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