The Sears Catalog

Sears is closing another 40 stores as it aims to survive Chapter 11 bankruptcy. They are not totally disappearing but this will leave the company with fewer than 500 locations.

But the Christmas season makes me think about another aspect of Sears that is also gone - the Christmas catalog.

When I was a kid and that catalog arrived, I spent days paging through the pages marking all the things I wanted to see under the Christmas tree. Of course, I didn't expect to get all the things I marked (even when I did believe in Santa Claus), but it was a lot of fun to "shop" in the catalog. Wasn't it called the "Wish Book" at some point?

But Sears was encouraging dreaming much earlier in the 20th century for adults. Beginning in 1908, Sears started selling entire houses from a catalog.

In those days they were still known as Sears, Roebuck & Co., and they were able to package and ship more than 400 different types of homes and buildings. These kits were  25-tons of 30,000 pre-cut parts, plumbing and electrical fixtures, and up to 750 pounds of nails. Without commercial air and ground shipping, the kits were transported by railroad.

Talk about the American Dream, if you had the cash, you could order in 1908 the original model, number 125, which was an 8 room bungalow style house. It cost $945.

Perhaps, more amazing is that while half of those kits were built professionally, the other half were built by the homeowners themselves DIY-style. Apparently, many of the latter construction projects were neighborhood "barn-raisings" with family, friends, and neighbors.

How about a 10 room colonial for $6488?

The complete homes sales ended in 1939 as WWII approached. Besides these arts and crafts Sears homes, there were other sources of homes of moderate cost.

Principles of Uncertainty

Maira Kalman wrote and illustrated "The Principles of Uncertainty," her column/blog, for The New York Times for a year (it ended in April 2007).


The blog became a book in 2007, also titled The Principles of Uncertainty What is it? Perhaps it is philosophy or art or memoir or sociology. The easy answer is that it is all those things, though that doesn't help classify it - if that's what you want done.

There's text, paintings, and photography. It is a year in a life. Maybe part of the uncertainty is what kind of book she wrote.

Kalman has also illustrated children's books, New Yorker covers for (including the famous map of “Newyorkistan” with Rick Meyerowitz).

She has 12 children’s books include Max Makes a Million, Swami on Rye and What Pete Ate. She also has designed fabric for Isaac Mizrahi, accessories for Kate Spade, sets for the Mark Morris Dance Company and, with her late husband Tibor Kalman, clocks, umbrellas and other accessories for the Museum of Modern Art. She lives in New York City and teaches graduate courses in design at the School of Visual Arts.

She also took on the task in 2005 of illustrating the venerable The Elements of Style and had a new way of looking at Strunk and White's reference classic with rather whimsical illustrations.

http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/

http://www.mairakalman.com/