Sears Canada Wish Books

[Kevers01]

As I'm sure did many others, when I was growing up the Sears Wish Book was a huge part of my Christmas. I've thought for the last number of years I'd really like to take a look at some of those old catalogues, and I think they have some value as far as tracking historical prices of items as well. Unfortunately, I can't find anywhere online scans of the Canadian catalogues from the 90s - 2000s, and for physical copies it seems like everyone selling wants an arm and a leg for them. 

I've previously done some scans for retromags with a direct feed scanner and I think they turned out great, so this is long shot but if anyone has access to these that they would be willing to donate I would love to debind and scan them. I bet there are tons of people that would like to have access to them. I'd be fine with covering the shipping (or picking up, if it happens to be local). 

Alternatively, if I've missed something in my extensive search that someone knows about, please send me a link, I'd really appreciate it! 

 

[matrixman]

Cant help for Canada but I grabbed many JC Penny and Sear ones for the US from eBay.  Are there Wishbooks catalogs here I missed?

[Kevers01]

1 hour ago, matrixman said:

Cant help for Canada but I grabbed many JC Penny and Sear ones for the US from eBay.  Are there Wishbooks catalogs here I missed?

Nah I don't think there's anything here like that that I know about, I just figured this might be the place to ask! 

[Kevers01]

Just in case anyone stumbles across this and is interested, I did manage to purchase almost every wish book back to the mid-90s and am working on debinding and scanning - https://archive.org/details/@kevin_demo

[E-Day]

I've already scanned 2011, 2012 and 2013 and will be releasing them here. But I love that you have the other ones! If you manager to ever get your hands on any Consumers Distributing catalogues that would be amazing.

[Kevers01]

On 12/12/2022 at 7:45 PM, E-Day said:

I've already scanned 2011, 2012 and 2013 and will be releasing them here. But I love that you have the other ones! If you manager to ever get your hands on any Consumers Distributing catalogues that would be amazing.

Good to know, I usually wind up at about 5 or so different thrift stores per week so I'll keep my eyes peeled for the Consumers Distributing ones and definitely pick them up and scan them if I happen to come across them! 

 

As for Christmas catalogues, if Retromags is into having them uploaded here I'd be more than happy to have my scans put up - frankly I'm not doing really anything for editing due to the sheer volume of pages, but I am auditing each of them to make sure that no pages were overlapped and fixing them up that way so they are at least complete, I can imagine these are the best scans we'll wind up seeing for most of these. I was sure surprised no one has taken on this initiative before, I think there's pretty widespread nostalgia for these. 

[E-Day]

I have never seen Consumers Distributing catalogues out in the wild, or even on Kijiji or Facebook Marketplace.

I don't really do much editing on the ones I scan just because of how thick they are, but I will check them for dust lines and rescan pages as needed. Even if the pages aren't perfectly cropped or straight, I don't want any of them to have dust lines running through them.

[JHD]

 

They cannot be disbound or scanning, but the Ottawa Public Library has bound copies of Eaton's catalogues from the 1970s onwards. When I was last there (quite some time ago), the collection did not extend into the 1980s -- so no video game listings -- but this is something else to be aware of.

(And I use the 's intentionally even though the firm itself later abandoned it to better appeal to the Francophone market.)

 

[E-Day]

13 hours ago, JHD said:

 

(And I use the 's intentionally even though the firm itself later abandoned it to better appeal to the Francophone market.)

 

It was Eaton's up to the very end. In Quebec they dropped the 's, but everywhere else it stayed Eaton's.

I was unaware that the Ottawa Public Library had those kinds of things. I've been to the library maybe 5 times in the 20 years I have lived here, and it was never the main branch downtown. Not sure when you were at the OPL last, but I don't know if they would still have that stuff.

[JHD]

 

I have been to Ottawa many times, but I was last in the Main Library around 2000.

 

I have just checked the online library database, and it looks like these printed catalogues are no longer available.  I was hoping that they would have continued to grow the collection to cover the debut of the 2600, Intellivision, etc.