Miskatonic University Campus

Greetings, all -

In the course of looking for EXACTLY this kind of resource for a Call of Cthulhu game I'm running that's set in 1914, I came across a fully-scanned copy of the Sears & Roebuck catalog for 1912. Weighs in at over 200 MB and 1200 pages in PDF. It is an absolute gold mine for anyone running a game set during this period. Available through the Internet Archive website, a San Francisco-based digitization project.

http://archive.org/details/catalogno12400sear

mjmedwick wrote:Greetings, all -

In the course of looking for EXACTLY this kind of resource for a Call of Cthulhu game I'm running that's set in 1914, I came across a fully-scanned copy of the Sears & Roebuck catalog for 1912. Weighs in at over 200 MB and 1200 pages in PDF. It is an absolute gold mine for anyone running a game set during this period. Available through the Internet Archive website, a San Francisco-based digitization project.

http://archive.org/details/catalogno12400sear

Fantastic find!

I have one of those reprinted 1923 S&R catalogs, but this is even better! And the 1912 era stuff would be great for equipment many people would have in the 20s anyway. My own personal pair of binoculars is from 1986, for example, and my backpack is vintage mid-90s.

Awesome stuff!
Now if we could find one for 20s and maybe 1880s and we'd be all set.

TAK wrote:Awesome stuff!
Now if we could find one for 20s and maybe 1880s and we'd be all set.

Well, I don't know if you were hoping for a PDF, but these 1923 reprints are fairly easy to get ahold of.

Wow. They sure did pack their pages as full as possible back then.
Thanks for sharing that link! That's a valuable resource.

Dr. Gerard wrote: Well, I don't know if you were hoping for a PDF, but these 1923 reprints are fairly easy to get ahold of.

Yeah, that would be fine, but PDF is where it's at, mainly cos I only play online. I might still get that print version, I can always use it for my own character and you do get a better idea on prices and value of money from those, the rulebooks is a bit too centered on "adventuring" equipment.

TAK wrote:

Dr. Gerard wrote: Well, I don't know if you were hoping for a PDF, but these 1923 reprints are fairly easy to get ahold of.

Yeah, that would be fine, but PDF is where it's at, mainly cos I only play online. I might still get that print version, I can always use it for my own character and you do get a better idea on prices and value of money from those, the rulebooks is a bit too centered on "adventuring" equipment.

Yes, I don't know how many times I've looked in that book to see if a particular item would be available, or what size it would be or how expensive. For 20s, I usually convert currency 10-to-1 for inflation, but that's not very accurate. It's just easy math.

http://www.westegg.com/inflation/

Niiiiiiice! Thanks for sharing.

Very cool, thanks for sharing. I have two old Sears & Roebuck catalogs from the 20s that I use all the time in my games. One interesting bit, in one of the catalogs you could mail order a Tommy gun. And people think gun laws are lax in the U.S. today.

You actually have one of those with the Tommy? I heard about that years ago, but I've never seen it in person. I'm glad to get confirmation that I was given good info.