We’ve been having a lot of fun lately looking through a 1969 Crown Publishers reprint of the 1902 edition of the Sears, Roebuck Catalogue, over 2 inches thick with 1,162 pages, and chockablock full of bargains.

The front cover in itself makes for interesting reading: Cash must be sent with all orders; no goods shipped C.O.D. (It makes you wish today’s economy worked on the same principle: if you can’t afford to pay for it, don’t get it).

The catalog boasts that Sears is the cheapest supply house on earth, and that “our trade reaches around the world.”

The real value of this book, the cover boasts, is plainly shown in every price quotation. It costs 50 cents to purchase the catalog, which warns: “We have no agents or solicitors — persons claiming to be our representatives are swindlers.”

The reprint offers an introduction by Cleveland Amory, who says “A glance through the pages of this catalogue provides a view of the American scene at the turn of the century,” and adds “the catalogue mirrors the dreams and needs of America at a time when life was less complex.”

After seeing what Sears had to offer through its catalog, it’s easy to understand why rural America relied on it so heavily for all its needs. The popular saying today, “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it,” certainly sums up the catalog.

Fine jewelry, dinnerware, cameras, musical instruments, bicycles, guns, hunting and camping equipment and clothing, delivery wagons and fancy buggies made to order, drugs to cure just about anything, mechanics tools, milking equipment, sugar and molasses, wall paper, stoves and refrigerators, blacksmith’s tools, well pumps, incubators, office and household furniture, bedding, art work, marble memorials, the latest in ladies and men’s fashions, dolls, steamer trunks — you name it, Sears offered it.

Perusing the catalog is as enlightening and entertaining as any movie could possibly be, even though it’s entirely in black and white!

Our thanks to Bruce Barter, who passed it along to us because he felt we’d enjoy it. He was right.

It provides a wonderful history lesson in what consumers were buying in 1902, and how much they were paying for them. We plan to share some of the prices with you in future columns as well as descriptive words used to sell the items.

Just a teaser: a very fancy 415-pound Acme American range which burns wood only, coal only or both coal and wood (the kind we’d all give anything to own today), could have been yours for $14.95 (cash, of course), plus $1.50 to $2 for shipping it within 500 miles.