Trade Catalogs, 1878–1930
Wholesalers, mail-order houses, and what they printed about ocarinas
C. Bruno & Son, Hamilton S. Gordon, R. S. Williams, Montgomery Ward, and Sears, Roebuck: half a century of American and Canadian trade catalogs, the Viennese and French lines they stocked, and what a catalog’s silence does not mean.
Every claim below names the document it came from, and every page image is reproduced from a scan the museum holds. Where a page is missing, misspelled, or illegible, the page says so. Research and drafting were done with help from Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant.
An exhibition catalog records what a maker chose to show once. A trade catalog records what somebody was willing to stock, price, warehouse, and ship — repeatedly, for years, at commercial risk. For the ocarina, the two sources answer different questions, and the trade side answers the one the museum is usually least able to reach: how did this instrument actually get into people’s hands?
A companion article on exhibition catalogs covers the other half.
What a trade catalog is, and the three kinds
They are not all the same document, and the differences determine what each can prove.
| kind | example here | what it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Wholesaler’s list | C. Bruno & Son, New York, 1890 | what a jobber offered to dealers, under the maker’s name and a trade numbering |
| Mail-order “big book” | Sears, Roebuck; Montgomery Ward | what a mass-market house sold direct to households, under its own stock numbers |
| Specialist house list | Hamilton S. Gordon; R. S. Williams | a music dealer’s own book, mixing imported lines with house brands |
They number differently, and that is worth noticing as you read. Two of these houses print an identical set of model numbers for the Viennese instruments; the mail-order houses print numbers of their own that change with the catalog.
How the museum found them
Working backward from one page. The hunt began because the museum held two small scans of ocarina pages — one from a Montgomery Ward catalog of 1890, one from Sears of 1897 — without any record of where they came from. Finding the originals meant searching the Internet Archive’s mail-order holdings systematically, and that turned up the rest.
Following a name once a page printed one. Most of these catalogs name no maker at all. Where one is named — “Fiehn’s Vienna Make” at Sears in 1897, “H. Fiehn—Vienna” at Bruno in 1890 — it gives a term to search the other volumes for. The French lines at Gordon and Williams were found the same way, from the heading rather than the maker.
Patent examiners naming trade print as prior art. Three documents in the “still missing” table below were found this way, from the museum’s patent register. An examiner’s citation is a document somebody has physically held, with a page number, which is a far better lead than any search.
Reading scans by eye when a machine reported something false about them — which happened more than once, and produced two of the more useful results here.
What the museum has recovered
Thirty-nine mail-order and trade volumes have been searched, each with a recorded verdict, including those that gave nothing. This table is what each search returned, volume by volume:
| year | house and edition | result | held as |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1878 | Montgomery Ward, No. 21, Spring | nothing to read either way — the catalog itemizes no instruments at all, offering “all kinds” on request | OCR |
| 1890 | C. Bruno & Son, New York | hit — four product lines under Fiehn’s name | |
| 1897 | Sears, Roebuck, No. 104, Spring | hit — “Fiehn’s Vienna Make” | page images |
| 1897 | Hamilton S. Gordon, New York | hit — a clay line and a French metal line | |
| 1897 | Lyon & Healy, Washburn styles | nothing to read either way — a catalog of Washburn’s own guitars and mandolins, so ocarinas were never its trade | OCR |
| 1902 | Sears, Roebuck, No. 111, Spring | hit — “Fiehn’s Vienna Make” | page images |
| 1911 | Sears, Roebuck, No. 122, Spring | hit — no maker named | page image |
| 1911 | R. S. Williams, Toronto, No. 32 | hit — the Viennese numbers, no maker named | |
| 1912 | Sears, Roebuck, No. 124 | hit — no maker named | |
| 1916 | Montgomery Ward, No. 132 | hit — “Genuine Vienna Ocarinas” | page image |
| 1920–1924 | Montgomery Ward, one volume a year | hits — wording varies, no maker | page images |
| 1922 | Sears, Roebuck, No. 144, Spring | no conclusion — 42 pages absent from the scan | page images |
| 1926 | Montgomery Ward, No. 104, Spring and Summer | negative for that season | page images |
| 1927 | Montgomery Ward | negative for that season | page images |
| 1929–30 | Montgomery Ward, No. 111, Fall and Winter | hit — “Genuine H. Fiehn Ocarinas” | page image |
| 1929–30 | Sears, Roebuck, No. 159, Fall and Winter | hit — no maker named, page 736 | page image |
What the catalogs say
Nothing in this section is inferred: each item is what a page states, and the page image is reproduced here in every case.
C. Bruno & Son, New York, 1890 — Fiehn wholesaled in America
An American musical instrument wholesaler — the tier between the Vienna factory and the mail-order houses. The contents index reads OCARINAS 248, and the section carries a two-line heading, the instrument and then the maker:
OCARINAS. H. FIEHN — VIENNA.
Four distinct product lines, with model numbers and prices each:
| line | numbers | as printed | price each |
|---|---|---|---|
| plain | 1–21 | C Soprano (4¼ inches) to Contra-Bass, Extra Size C (14½ inches) | $0.35 – $7.75 |
| tuning slide | 103–108½ | “G Soprano, with Tuning Slide”, F, E, E♭, D Alto, C, B♭, A♭ | $1.70 – $2.80 |
| keyed | 203–206 | “G Soprano, 2 Keys, Tuning Slide”, and F, E, E♭, D Alto, C the same | $4.75 – $6.75 |
| ivory | 303–306 | “G Soprano, Ivory Mouthpiece, 2 Keys, Tuning Slide” | $6.50 – $8.50 |
Keyed ocarinas were a cataloged product line in 1890 — two keys throughout, at every size from G soprano to C alto — and so were tuning-slide ocarinas, with model numbers and prices of their own. Both correspond to claims in Fiehn’s German patent of 1881, DE 16,668, which covers keys marked F-sharp and G “zur Vermehrung des Umfanges”, a mouthpiece set into the blowing opening, and “die Anordnung des Stimmzuges” — the arrangement of the tuning slide. The patent and the catalog describe the same product range, nine years apart.
Soprano, alto, bass, contra bass
The four-tier size naming is already settled here, in 1890. Bruno runs from C Soprano through D Alto to Contra-Bass, Extra Size C at 14½ inches, and Williams prints the same four words in Toronto twenty-one years later. These are the terms most English-language brands still use for ocarina sizes, and this is the earliest statement of them the museum has found.
It was never universal. Prima/Aketa in Japan named its models differently — Piccolo, Cornettino, Larigho, Doubllette, Cornetta, Alto, Tenor, Bass — a borrowing from the recorder and cornett families rather than from these lists; the sizes are set out on the museum’s page for the Prima Cornetta M5C. Whether anybody reaching for soprano and contra bass today knew these catalogs is not something this page can answer.
R. S. Williams, Toronto, 1911 — the Viennese runs again, twenty-one years later
Catalogue no. 32 of musical merchandise, page 321, headed:
OCARINAS BEST QUALITY, VIENNA MAKE METHODS GRATIS WITH EACH OCARINA
Two engravings sit side by side at the head of the page, each with its number range set beneath it: “Nos. 1 to 21” under the plain instrument on the left, “Nos. 103 to 206” under the one with a tuning slide on the right. Three runs follow: the plain line 1–21, closing at “21 —C, 14½ in. in length”; then OCARINAS WITH TUNING SLIDE, which covers both 103–108 and the keyed 203–206, “G Sop., 2 keys, with tuning slide”.
The two houses use the same numbers for the same instruments. Bruno in New York in 1890 and Williams in Toronto in 1911 both run 1 to 21, 103 to 108, 203 to 206, with the same 14½-inch contra bass closing the plain line and the same fractional numbers — 104½ for E, 104¾ for E♭ — in the slide run. Twenty-one years and an international border apart, that is not independently invented.
The fractions are themselves informative. Williams’s plain line carries 2½ (A♭), 4½ (E), 4¾ (E♭), 7½ (A) and 11½ (E♭), each sitting between two whole numbers — the shape left behind when sizes are added later to fill gaps between keys that the original run of twenty-one did not cover.
Whose numbers they are is not settled. They could be the factory’s or the wholesale trade’s, and the catalogs do not say. What the museum can add is from its own shelves: Fiehn ocarinas with a tuning slide or keys carry the same impressed numbers as the plain ones, so the 100-, 200- and 300-series are not what was stamped on the instruments. Whether Fiehn issued them for his trade lists or a wholesaler built them is an open question.
The contrast with a house’s own stock numbers is still sharp. Hamilton S. Gordon of New York, in the same period, used 1510 to 1538 for clay ocarinas and 1540 to 1546 for French ones — numbers that belong to Gordon’s book and change with it.
And one caution, from this very page. The correspondence is not total. Bruno’s 303–306 is Fiehn’s ivory mouthpiece line. Williams’s 303–307 is something else entirely:
FRENCH OCARINAS EARTHEN OCARINAS COVERED WITH WHITE CELLULOID MAKING THEM INDESTRUCTIBLE No. 303—E♭ Ocarina, celluloid covered, length 4⅞ inches … 307—G … with a nickel plated tuning slide
So the 300-series carries a different product in each catalog, and the prices say the same thing: Bruno’s 303 is $6.50, Williams’s is $0.85. A number alone is not an identification.
What transfers between the two houses is the Viennese sequence — 1–21, 103–108, 203–206 — and within those runs a number is evidence: 103 is a G soprano with a tuning slide whether it turns up in New York in 1890 or Toronto in 1911. Outside them, a number has to be read with the line heading above it.
Hamilton S. Gordon, New York, 1897 — two national traditions on one page
One page, two headings, two engravings.
OCARINAS. CLAY, BLACK, WITH GILT POINTS. No. 1510 C, Soprano… Each $0.30 … 1531 F, Contra Bass… 3.90 … 1534 C… 6.00 … 1535 Duett… Per Set 1.40 … 1536 Trio… 4.75 … 1537 Quartette… 7.00 … 1538 ” in fine Case… 9.00
FRENCH OCARINAS. No. 1540 In C, Soprano, Metal, Nickel Plated… Each $0.25 … 1544 C, Alto… 0.75 … 1546 C, with Tuning Slide… 1.15
Two engravings sit side by side above the lists, each with a line of type beneath it giving a number range: Nos. 1510 to 1521 under the clay instrument on the left, Nos. 1540 to 1546 under the metal one on the right. The clay list runs past its engraving, to 1538 — twenty-five sizes from C soprano to C contra bass, then a duet, a trio, and a quartet, with 1538 the quartet again in a fine case.
French, metal, nickel-plated, with a tuning slide, sold in New York in 1897 — in the same year and the same city that Sears was selling Viennese clay ones by mail. An American house stocking both traditions at once, which is what makes the metal French instrument a commercial line rather than a curiosity.
The catalog names no maker for either line, but both engravings can be placed. The left one matches Teschner ocarinas in the museum’s collection, by the distinctive stamp on the mouthpiece. The right one is a Mathieu — the Paris maker whose metal ocarinas the Library of Congress holds, and whose FR 212,700 of 1891 claims a nouveau genre d’ocarine métallique.
And the clay line’s key sequence is the Viennese one — C soprano down through the altos and basses to a C contra bass, the same run Bruno and Williams print under Fiehn’s name, renumbered into Gordon’s own 1510s. So the engraving and the line it sits above may not be the same instrument. A catalog house reused whatever cut it had, and an illustration is not a purchase order. What the page establishes is the trade; who supplied it is an inference, and it is marked as one.
Sears, Roebuck, 1897 — “Fiehn’s Vienna Make”
Consumers Guide, Catalogue No. 104, Spring 1897, page 532. Controls strong: free reed 82, plucked 312, bowed 279, wind 110.
Ocarinas. “A very popular instrument easy to learn and simple to play. Instruction sheet with each instrument.”
Fiehn’s Vienna Make.
Catalog numbers 7812–7838, from Key of C, Soprano, $0.18 down through the altos, basses, and an E♭ contra bass at $2.60, then “Quartettes, 1st and 2nd Tenor, 1st and 2nd Bass” at $3.65 the set and “Sextettes” at $9.75. The weights are given at the foot: sopranos 4 oz, altos 14 oz, bass 26 oz, contra bass 40 oz.
The same catalog sells an ocarina method by mail, nine pages later, in a run of Ryan’s instructors between the double bass and the harmonica:
No. 71988. Ryan’s True Ocarina Instructor: publisher’s price, 75c. Our price $0.25. Extra, by mail, 3 cents.
Sears, Roebuck, 1902 — importing direct, and renumbering
Catalogue No. 111, Spring 1902, page 208.
Ocarinas. Fiehn’s Vienna Make. “NO BETTER OCARINAS can be had at any price… WE IMPORT THESE DIRECT FROM EUROPE and own them at prices enabling us to offer them to you at about what your dealer himself pays. THESE INSTRUMENTS ARE EASILY BROKEN and must be packed with care.”
Two trade facts on this page. Sears was importing direct from Europe — “WE IMPORT THESE DIRECT FROM EUROPE and own them at prices enabling us to offer them to you at about what your dealer himself pays” — rather than buying through a domestic wholesaler, which is a different relationship from Bruno’s. And Sears numbered the line itself: 12R3120 to 12R3141, with 12R3146 for the quartettes, where Bruno and Williams printed the Viennese runs.
Twenty-two sizes, C soprano at 14¢ down to G bass at $1.90, and the shipping weights beneath: “Sopranos, weight, 4-oz.; Altos, 14-oz.; Bass, 26-oz.; Contra Bass, 40-oz.” — though no contra bass is actually listed in the prices. The instruction sheet is there too: “A sheet of instructions with each instrument showing exactly how it is played.”
Sears, Roebuck, 1911 and 1912 — still selling, no longer naming
Ocarinas. Very Best Grade. “Our Ocarinas are made of fine quality clay, beautifully enameled and finished. We guarantee them to be in perfect tune, easy to blow and of rich and birdlike tone. We are offering them to you at a ridiculously low price. A sheet of instructions with each instrument.”
No. 12F2045 QUARTET. “Consists of 1st and 2d Tenor, 1st and 2d Bass. These are carefully selected instruments and accurately tuned to harmonize.” $2.15
“NOTE — Be sure to give catalog number and key of instrument desired. Large instruments should be shipped by express.”
Four stock numbers: 12F2042 sopranos, 12F2043 altos, 12F2044 basses, 12F2045 the quartet — sopranos from 11¢, the G bass at $1.84 and marked unmailable.
Catalog No. 124 of 1912 repeats the copy almost word for word, down to the ridiculously low price, at 12H2042–12H2045: the letter moves with the catalog number while the digits stay. Its index lists Ocarinas at pages 344–346. A settled house product, not one season’s omission.
And the silence is pointed. The same section names origins freely for everything else — “Genuine American”, “French Instruments”, “German”, “Genuine Rogers”, “Genuine Paquet”. The ocarinas alone are anonymous.
So between 1902 and 1911 the ocarina stopped being a named Viennese import at Sears and became an unattributed commodity. That is a claim about Sears, with a document on either side of it. It is not a claim about the American trade, and it is emphatically not a claim about Fiehn — see below.
Montgomery Ward, 1916 — “Genuine Vienna Ocarinas”
Catalogue No. 132, page 484.
Ocarinas. “These are the Genuine Vienna Ocarinas. Made of fine quality pottery; nicely enameled and finished. They have a rich, birdlike tone and are easy to blow. An instruction sheet with every instrument.”
Twenty sizes, from 51C6863—C. Sop., 5 oz., $0.20 down through the sopranos and altos to 51C6883—G. Bass, 3 lbs., $2.25, with a shipping weight printed against each one. The run is 6863 to 6883 with 6865 skipped.
Note what else is on this page: “Best Quality American Made Jews Harp.” That adjacency matters, and the Sears 1922 section below is why.
Montgomery Ward, 1929 — “Genuine H. Fiehn Ocarinas”
Catalogue No. 111, Fall & Winter 1929–30, page 461.
Genuine H. Fiehn Ocarinas. “A great favorite among the smaller instruments. The sweet flute-like tone makes a very effective dance orchestra solo. Special clay with holes properly spaced to insure clear, perfect scales. Small, compact and easy to play. Complete instructions sent with each instrument.”
Twelve items, 51 E 364 to 51 E 375: sopranos C, B♭, A, G, F, E, E♭ from 18¢; altos C, B♭, G; a C bass at 89¢; and a Quartette in C — “one C Soprano, one G Soprano, one F Soprano and one C Alto. Accurately tuned to harmonize with each other” — $1.19.
Montgomery Ward was printing Heinrich Fiehn’s name in 1929, thirty-two years after Sears first printed it and eighteen years after Sears stopped.
Sears in the same season — “our ocarinas are imported”, and no more
Catalog No. 159, Fall and Winter 1929–30, page 736 — the same season as the Ward page above.
Fine Quality Ocarinas — Popular on the Air. “Ocarinas are not toys; they are real instruments capable of producing beautiful harmonies. They are very easy to learn to play. Our ocarinas are imported and made of special clay. We guarantee them to be in perfect tune, easy to blow and bird-like in tone. Sheet of instructions with each instrument.”
Sopranos at 12T5222 from 20¢, altos at 12T5223, a C bass at 12T5224 for 95¢, and two quartets — 12T5225 in C at $1.23 and 12T5227 in G at $1.69.
Imported, and that is all. Ward’s page and this one are the same season of the same year in the same country, sold by two mail-order houses of the same size — and one names Heinrich Fiehn while the other names nobody. That is the clearest demonstration on this page of what governs the whole article: what a catalog prints is a fact about that catalog, not about the instrument or the man who made it.
The heading is worth keeping too. Popular on the Air is a 1929 claim about radio, and “ocarinas are not toys” is a mail-order house arguing against the very filing the exhibition juries had used.
Ward’s wording wobbles, and nothing about the instrument changed
| year | how Ward describes them |
|---|---|
| 1916 | “Genuine Vienna Ocarinas” — the city |
| 1920 | “Learn to Make Good Music in a Few Hours’ Time” — nothing |
| 1921 | “Ocarina”, beside the Celestaphone — nothing |
| 1922 | “Ocarinas… All Keys” — nothing |
| 1923 | “Imported Ocarinas” — foreign origin asserted, unnamed. 13 sizes |
| 1924 | “A very popular instrument with a most pleasing tone” — nothing |
| 1926, 1927 | none at all |
| 1929 | “Genuine H. Fiehn Ocarinas” — the maker |
Thirteen years, one house, six different ways of saying the same thing and two years of saying nothing. What changed is the wording on the page. Whether that was Ward’s copywriter, a change of supplier, or something Fiehn’s side asked for, none of these pages says.
The 1923 entry is on page 467, headed Wood Wind Instruments, in a small section to the left of the snare drums and below the Laube clarinets and the Meyers System flutes:
Imported Ocarinas. “The Ocarina is a very popular instrument, the tone is mellow and most pleasing to the ear. Perfect in tone. Shipping weight, each, 1 pound.”
Thirteen sizes and a quartet in C — four sopranos, seven altos, two basses, from 51 E 575—Key of C. Soprano at 15¢ to 51 E 584—Key of C. Bass at 90¢, with 51 E 597—Quartet of C at $1.25. Set against the other two years the museum has counted, Ward’s range narrows steadily: twenty sizes in 1916, thirteen in 1923, eleven in 1929, each count excluding the quartet. Meanwhile the house went from naming the city, to naming nothing, to naming the maker. The range and the copy move independently.
Sears 1922 — the evidence is a hole
Catalog No. 144, Spring 1922. The instrument department begins at page 502, and pages 507 to 548 are absent from the scan — exactly where the ocarinas would sit.
Forty-two pages are missing from the scan, not from the catalog — nothing here says Sears printed no ocarinas in 1922. Both leaves either side of the hole are held, because here the evidence is the discontinuity: a negative that cannot be taken, shown by two pages that should not be adjacent.
This is also why the museum checks a nearby control rather than a global one. Ocarinas and Jew’s harps are printed together in Sears 1902 and 1911 and in Ward 1916, 1923, and 1929 — five catalogs, two houses, twenty-seven years. A volume that returns no Jew’s harps either has lost the page they share, and a count of instruments taken across the whole book will not notice.
What a maker’s absence from a catalog does not mean
A name appearing and then not appearing is the commonest pattern in these tables, and it is tempting to read as a maker’s rise and fall. It is not evidence of one. There are at least four innocent explanations, and “the maker stopped” is not among the likely ones:
- The series stopped, the volume was not digitized, or the scan omits the department. Sears 1922 is 9.7 million characters covering no music at all.
- The supplier changed. A name leaving Sears means it left Sears. If it moved to another jobber, the trade did not change; the page did.
- The house changed its own policy. Sears numbered the line into its own stock numbers in 1902 while still naming the maker, and named nobody at all by
- That is a house becoming a brand, and it happened across the whole section rather than to one supplier.
- The catalog is not the trade. Ward printed Fiehn’s name in 1929–30 in the very season Sears sold the same kind of instrument anonymously.
Fiehn is the case where this can be tested, because the museum holds the instruments. Its collection includes Fiehn ocarinas in colored finishes understood to have been made for the American market, stamped “Made in Germany” rather than “Made in Austria” — which places them no earlier than the German annexation of Austria in 1938, a quarter century after Sears stopped printing his name. Any sentence implying he declined after 1911 is unsupported by anything on this page.
What can be speculated
Everything above is what a page states. This is not.
The Viennese trade reached America through wholesalers first and mail order second. Bruno is wholesaling Fiehn’s full range in 1890; Sears is retailing him by 1897 and importing direct by 1902. That is a plausible sequence from three documents, not an established one — a wholesaler’s catalog surviving from 1890 and a mail-order one from 1897 may say more about what was digitized than about what came first.
Anonymity may be a sign of competition rather than of decline. By 1911 Sears prints no maker; the imitators EWA, Champion, and Bondi are known to have been working by then. A house buying from several sources cannot print one name. No document here supports this. It is the question to ask of the next catalog found.
The instruction sheet was supplied continuously from at least 1897 to 1929 — Sears says so in 1897, 1902, 1911, and 1912, Williams gives “methods gratis” in 1911, and Ward promises “complete instructions” in 1929. The museum holds Fiehn’s own four-language method sheet, which is a sheet of exactly that kind. Which house any particular surviving sheet reached a buyer through is not something a sheet records.
The ocarina was filed with toys and novelties throughout. Ward 1916 puts it beside the Celestaphone and the Jew’s harps under “These Musical Instruments Are Easy to Play”; Ward 1929 sells it for its “dance orchestra solo”. Where it sat on the page is itself a claim about what it was taken to be — and it agrees with the exhibition record, where two juries eight years and half a world apart filed it among toys and musical automata.
What is still missing, and what each would fill
| wanted | what it would settle |
|---|---|
| Montgomery Ward Catalog No. 71, 1903 — page 473, item H9313 | What the item is. All four Frazeur design patents cite this exact page and item as prior art, so a US examiner in 1948 treated a 1903 mail-order listing as the published state of the art. It also falls in the Ward gap, where the museum has 1890 and then nothing until 1916. |
| Any Sears big book, 1913–1928, with its music department intact | The worst gap. Ward sold ocarinas every year from 1916 to 1924, and Sears is simply unknown across the same span because the one volume held is missing pages 507–548. |
| Sears Christmas Book, 1958 — page 369, item F, “Little Orby” | A named American mail-order ocarina, in a year nothing above reaches — the latest catalog on this page is 1929–30. A product name can be searched for across other sources in a way that “Ocarinas, Very Best Grade” cannot. |
| C. Bruno & Son catalogs of other years | To date when Fiehn’s keyed (203–206) and ivory-mouthpiece (303–306) lines appeared and disappeared. The Viennese runs match between 1890 and 1911; the ivory line does not appear in Williams at all, and more editions would date its arrival and departure. |
| Modern Plastics, August 1939, p. 25; Playthings, October 1939, p. 13 | When plastic ocarinas reached the trade, and how the toy press described them. Both are cited by patent examiners with page numbers. |
| A Sears catalog of 1905 or 1908 | When Sears stopped naming the maker, which is now bracketed only between 1902 and 1911. The Internet Archive’s volumes for these years are not usable: its 1902 and 1910 are hardware editions with no instrument department, and its 1908 is a modern facsimile that is access-restricted. |
Where these catalogs are
Every page quoted and every page image above is from the Internet Archive, which serves all of these volumes in full — they are long out of copyright. The identifiers are below, and the museum holds its own copy of each.
| house | edition | Internet Archive identifier |
|---|---|---|
| C. Bruno & Son, New York | Illustrated catalogue, 1890 | illustratedcatal00cbru |
| Hamilton S. Gordon, New York | 1897 | hamilton-s.-gordon-1897 |
| R. S. Williams, Toronto | Catalogue no. 32, 1911 | catalogueno32ofm00rswi |
| Sears, Roebuck | Consumers Guide No. 104, Spring 1897 | sears-roebuck-catalog-104-spring-1897 |
| No. 111, Spring 1902 | sears-roebuck-catalogue-111 |
|
| No. 122, Spring 1911 | sears-roebuck-catalog-122-spring-1911 |
|
| No. 124, 1912 | catalogno12400sear |
|
| No. 144, Spring 1922 — the volume with the gap | SearsRoebuckAndCoCatalog1922 |
|
| No. 159, Fall and Winter 1929–30 | sears-roebuck-catalog-159-t-1929-30 |
|
| Montgomery Ward | 1916 | montgomerywardca1916mont |
| 1920 · 1921 · 1922 | montgomerywardca1920mont · 1921 · 1922 |
|
| 1923 · 1924 | montgomerywardca1923mont · 1924 |
|
| No. 104, Spring and Summer 1926 | montgomery-ward-catalogue-104-1926-spr-sum |
|
| 1927 | montgomerywardca1927mont |
|
| No. 111, Fall and Winter 1929–30 | montgomery-ward-catalogue-111-1929 |
A caution for anyone following these up. Do not trust the text layer alone. One of these scans was read by a machine set to the wrong script and returns nothing for Sears or shoes, let alone ocarina; another is missing forty-two pages in the middle of its music department. Every quotation above was checked against the page image, and so should any correction to it be.