20 Shocking Things You Could Once Order From A Catalog

The Lahti L-39 was a Finnish anti-tank rifle, built to pierce armor during WWII. A few years later, you could mail-order one from Interarmco, an arms importer that sold war surplus through catalog circulars. Just send in your money order, and the rifle, which weighed 109 pounds, would arrive by express rail in a wooden crate with anti-recoil skis and extra magazines. That was all perfectly legal, until Congress passed a federal law banning it in 1968.

Novelty mail-order house Johnson Smith & Co. had been peddling live baby gators as pets for years. These little ones, mere inches long, were obtained in Florida and Louisiana and could be purchased for a few dollars each. They were sent directly to the buyer’s home via express mail, in small wood or perforated cardboard boxes. Once state laws regarding the transport of reptiles took effect, the demand fell off, and adult gators were released into urban waterways.

In its 1902 mail order catalog, Sears, Roebuck & Co., America’s largest mail order business at the time, listed nitroglycerin dynamite for farmers to use for blasting out tree roots or rocks in their fields. This was real, explosive dynamite. A farmer could buy it for about 13 cents a pound. The company also carried electric plungers and blasting caps for dynamite, and it had to comply with railroad regulations requiring dynamite and caps to be shipped on separate trains. For many people, especially those in remote farming communities, buying dynamite through the mail was routine.

In the early 1900s, Sears’s Modern Homes catalog allowed you to order a whole house, not from your mailbox, but from a boxcar on the railroad tracks. Each house kit might include as many as 30,000 separate items, such as framing, nails, and doorknobs. More than 70,000 were bought in the US. Early versions of these kit-homes contained uncut, rough-sawn timbers, while the later-generation “Honor Bilt” houses offered pre-cut lumber and guides promising easy and speedy assembly. When mortgages became unpayable during the Depression, the Sears home program died.

Johnson Smith & Co., the novelty mail-order business that sold the alligators, was also selling live squirrel monkeys from South America in the 1950s. For $19.95, a magazine’s catalog insert promised an affectionate, cage-trainable pet that would eat any food you do and arrive by express mail in a perforated wooden crate complete with feeding instructions. But the mail-order monkey trade wouldn’t endure. In the 1970s, federal animal welfare and wildlife import laws shut it down.

Even before prescriptions were required, Sears sold liquid laudanum, a mix of opium and alcohol, and morphine solutions for less than $1 per bottle, as remedies for “headaches, neuralgias, insomnia, and other disorders.” Sears slowly stopped carrying those products as the outcry against them mounted, and a federal labeling law approached. The 1906 law merely required companies to label their products with correct ingredients. It was the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act in 1914 that really started regulating narcotics.

The Sears catalog of 1902 advertised the “Heidelberg Electric Belt,” a battery-powered belt worn around a man’s waist to cure “all diseases, disorders and weaknesses,” ranging from stomach trouble to nervous exhaustion. It cost between $12 and $18, delivering a mild electric shock. This product was popular because of Victorians’ love affair with electricity as a treatment for everything. The American Medical Association eventually revealed that such belts were quackery, with no medical effects.

Sears tried selling cars on two occasions. The first time was during the early part of the 20th century, when Sears sold a cheap car it called a Motor Buggy. This was shipped in a big wooden crate on a railroad car, and the customer had to attach the four wheels. In later years, Sears tried again with a small car called the Allstate that was actually made by Kaiser-Frazer and just put Sears’s name on it. Sales weren’t good, and the car was pulled from the market after a short while.

Women of the 1890s-1920s could achieve that era’s signature pompadours thanks to Sears’s Hair Goods Department, because they didn’t even have to grow out their own hair to get there. A customer would mail a small piece of her hair to Sears, and the catalog company’s workers would use it to create custom hair switches, pompadour rolls, and toupees, color-matched to her shade. In the early 20th century, there was no synthetic hair, so all of it was natural.

Sears’ Medical Department offered hand-blown glass eyes to farm and factory workers who had lost one, for around $5 apiece. Customers could select their own color scheme, choosing from diagrams in the Sears catalogs showing the shade of the iris, the size of the pupil, and the shade of the white of the eye. They were strictly cosmetic, because these glass eyes didn’t restore any sight, and they were phased out in favor of plastic ones many decades later.

Because dental labs operated separately from dentists, rural families could craft their own false teeth at home between 1900 and 1942. You’d be sent a wax impression kit, bite down on it, take a mold of your gums, and mail the wax back to the dental lab. The workers would then fashion the porcelain-and-vulcanite dentures for you and mail them to you. In 1942, this practice was halted by a federal law that specified that only a licensed dentist could order this type of service.

Sears also sold outbuildings, such as barns, in its catalogs, not in its house catalog. From the 1910s to the 1930s, Sears published a “Book of Barns” in which farmers could order a gambrel-roof barn, wooden silo, or livestock stalls with heavy timber framing, shipped in rail freight boxcars. The lumber had already been pre-cut by a factory, which meant it was much less expensive than hiring a craftsman to cut traditional timber framing by hand. This was a huge savings for farmers looking to expand their operations in the Midwest.

In 1897, Sears’s Memorial Art Department offered custom granite and marble headstones via its catalog and the post office under the slogan “Direct from Quarry to Cemetery.” The customer selected a design and lettering, either for Vermont marble or Barre granite, at costs ranging from $4.20 to $8.60. The completed stone was delivered to the cemetery by rail freight from the factory. Sears did not sell caskets. It sold only the grave marker and the cemetery ironwork that surrounded the plot.

As early as the late 1800s, dry counties could have their liquor sent via the mail. Sears and other mail-order retailers shipped whiskey, bourbon, and wine in barrels and boxes by freight train for years prior to 1920, when the 18th Amendment was ratified and Prohibition took effect. Federal laws restricting the shipment of alcohol by mail were in place long before the passage of the 18th Amendment.

Asbestos-cement shingles were once promoted as the safest, most fireproof siding a family could own. In catalogs from the 1910s to the 1950s, Sears and Montgomery Ward sold asbestos shingles along with stove lining and pipe insulation, advertising the material as fireproof and indestructible. Asbestos was commonly used in mid-century kit homes and farm buildings because its ability to damage lungs and cause cancer wasn’t yet known. Federal health regulations only phased it out decades later.

Sears sold a Vapor Bath Cabinet in its 1897 and 1902 catalogs, a collapsible rubber-lined canvas tent that you could erect over a kerosene or alcohol burner for around five dollars. Inside the tent sat a wooden stool. You could sit there with your head sticking out of the top and sweat out the “bodily toxins” thought to be causing the cold and rheumatism. For rural families isolated from “civilization,” it was a cheap replacement for pricey mineral baths.

Through Sears and Montgomery Ward’s farm catalogs, farmers could order live honeybees to pollinate their fields and establish new colonies. The consumer could purchase a single mated queen in a small wooden cage with food, in the form of sugar paste, or they could buy an entire, functional colony of around 10,000 bees crammed into a wooden box with a wire-mesh front. In either case, the bees were delivered via U.S. Parcel Post directly to the farm.

Baby chicks have leftover egg yolk inside of them after they hatch, which means they can survive without food or water for up to 48 hours. That’s what allowed this whole operation to succeed. After the U.S. Postal Service approved the mailing of live poultry in 1918, Sears and Montgomery Ward started marketing young birds for as little as a few cents apiece. In the decades that followed, they were delivered to area post offices in small cardboard boxes equipped with air holes.

In the 1930s, Johnson Smith & Co., the novelty catalog company that also sold the alligators and monkeys, offered X-Ray Specs for under $1 each. But the eyewear was nothing more than an optical gimmick. The lenses were embedded with feathers or a special diffraction grating that produced a double-image effect, making it seem as though you could see through skin or even thin clothing.

Founded by General John T. Thompson in the 1920s, Auto-Ordnance Corporation sold its fully automatic Thompson submachine guns to consumers through its own sporting catalogs. For around $200, ranchers, law enforcement officials, and other civilians could buy a Thompson without background checks or federal registration before new federal laws began taxing and registering automatic weapons in 1934.

This content was created with the help of AI.