The Wish Book: how Sears taught America to circle things

Paper & Print

For sixty years it arrived in late summer and was read more carefully than anything else in the house. The Sears Wish Book taught American children how to want things — and the ones who circled hardest are now the adults with the money and the search alerts.

By Matthew Partsch

The book that taught a country to want things

Sears did not invent the mail-order catalog and did not invent Christmas. What it perfected was something subtler: the idea that a child should be handed a merchandising document in early autumn and then left alone with it for three months.

The first Sears Christmas Book appeared in 1933, a slim 87 pages issued separately from the general catalog. The gift mix reads now like a period novel — a “Miss Pigtails” doll, a battery-powered toy automobile, a five-pound box of chocolates, Lionel electric trains, a Mickey Mouse watch, fruitcake, and canaries that sang, delivered by mail. Customers had already been calling the big semiannual Sears catalogs the wish book, or the book of wishes, long before there was a Christmas edition to attach the name to. In 1968 Sears gave in and printed it on the cover.

The timing was the whole trick. The book landed in August or September, when a child had no plausible use for it and every reason to study it anyway. By December the pages were soft at the corners, the toy section had come loose from the binding, and the family had spent four months negotiating with a document that Sears had written. No retailer today gets that kind of access to a household.

Circling

Ask anyone over forty how the Wish Book was used and you get the same answer with small variations. You circled. Some households allowed a pen, some a highlighter, some only a folded corner — one Canadian family, interviewed years later, gave each child a fixed number of dog-eared pages, which is a rationing scheme worthy of a central bank. Siblings fought over who got the book first, because the first reader set the terms.

What made it work is that the catalog never argued with you. It was flat, encyclopedic, and completely without hindsight. A fad that lasted eighteen months got the same seamless white background and the same enthusiastic copy as a franchise that lasted forty years. Every entry carried a size, an age range, a catalog number and a shipping weight to the ounce. A child reading it was not being sold to in any way they could detect. They were reading a reference book about the world of available objects, and forming preferences.

That is the part worth being honest about. The Wish Book is beloved, and it was also a piece of commercial engineering aimed squarely at people who could not buy anything, on the correct assumption that they would do the selling for free. Both of those things are true. It is possible to love an object and see clearly what it was for.

The end, and the archive

Sears announced the closure of its catalog division in January 1993, alongside hundreds of store and catalog-desk closures. In a great many small towns the catalog desk had been the retail economy, and of everything the company announced that week, it was the death of the Big Book that held the country’s attention. A revived Wish Book turned up in 2007 at 188 pages — the first full catalog in fourteen years, and a fraction of the 832-page book it was imitating.

What nobody expected in 1993 was that the catalogs would come back anyway, in a form Sears had nothing to do with. Volunteer archivists have scanned decades of holiday catalogs — Sears, JCPenney, Montgomery Ward, FAO Schwarz — and posted them page by page for anyone to read. The toy section you took apart as a child is intact online, in order, with the prices.

The ones you circled

Here is the strange arithmetic of all this. The child who circled the thing and did not get it is now an adult with a credit card and a functioning search engine. The object costs a fraction of a week’s pay instead of being an impossible ask. And the catalog that created the wanting is sitting online, free, with the page number.

Some of what you find will not survive contact. The toy was nine inches of acrylic pile and it stays nine inches of acrylic pile; buying it does not retrieve the year. But some of it lands exactly as it should — not because the object is remarkable, but because you spent a whole autumn thinking about it, and finishing that thought thirty or forty years later turns out to be worth something.

Find the page first. Then go look for the thing.