Montgomery Ward – The Wish Book

By Bennett Owen

Photo courtesy of eBay.com

"When you live 90 miles from town a Montgomery Ward or Sears catalog gets read more than the Bible or Shakespeare...

…We had been getting the Montgomery Ward catalog since 1885. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the part played by this book of wonder in the children's lives. They pored over it endlessly; before they could read, the pictures were there to dazzle them...the catalog is well named the "wish book" by country people...They (the children) never went to school until we moved to Miles City (Montana) ...all they knew up to that time was reading as taught by Montgomery Ward, and printing block letters, which I taught them.”

From the Diary of Nannie T. Alderson        

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In its day it was a revolution every bit as momentous as the Internet…a link between civilization and the outer fringes of the American Frontier. Aaron Montgomery Ward was a traveling salesman who saw the need to cater to a vast, untapped reserve of rural consumers. In 1872 he released his first ‘catalog’, a single page listing fewer than 100 items. A decade later it had grown to well over 200 pages with 10-thousand products including:

• Opium (yes, opium!)
• Ear Trumpets
• ‘Sweet Spirits of Nitre’ * (Oh my God, pay attention to the asterisk!)
• Bust Cream
• Violins
• Winchesters

Photo courtesy of eBay.com

Photo courtesy of eBay.com 

No, we’re not going to list all 10-thousand items, so consider these your Montgomery Cliffs Notes.

“Our mail order methods meet many wants,” wrote an enthusiastic copywriter in 1885.  And one of those was entertainment while using the outdoor plumbing. When I was a kid there was a stack of ‘em in every outhouse at the ranch and, yes, the women’s lingerie section got pretty dog-eared in those days.

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Montgomery Ward also came up with the slogan “satisfaction guaranteed or your money back,” and it also launched the concept of “rural free delivery”…aka RFD for all you Mayberry fans.

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This brings me to another edition of Luddites R Us, where my perfect track record of predictions remains unbroken:

• E Books have no future
• No one will buy stuff on the Internet
• 24-hour television news channel? Ridiculous!

So how would I have felt a mere 130 years ago if someone had an idea that a customer in the wilds of Wyoming, 90 miles from the nearest post office could place an order for a chuck wagon and that order would somehow make its way to Chicago, Illinois and that chuck wagon would somehow be delivered to their outfit? Preposterous!

* Check the comments at  http://www.finishing.com/324/13.shtml and bring a Kleenex because you will laugh yourself silly.

Find this commodious book here.