Originally published at: The Johnson Smith Novelty catalog offered 600 jam-packed pages of vintage weirdness | Boing Boing
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The juxtaposition of your image snippets "Live Monkeys Make Wonderful Pets’ followed by “Genuine Monkey Skull” duly noted. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
Great stuff!
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There may be a return policy with some sort of deposit. “If your monkey perishes, return it’s skull for 20% of on the purchase of your next monkey”.
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Just be prepared for massive disappointment when you order something and discover what you’re actually getting.
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Wonderful. Love this stuff. I did a series of artwork in grad school around J&S items smashed-together with the fictitious ACME of Warner-Bros. cartoons and their over-the-top power.
Even had a catalog. I was unaware of how numerous their offerings were, as I was drawing from their single-page ads in my comic collection from the '70s. Thank you for the education!
Pity about the monkeys.
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Unfortunately, it has lots of racist and sexist items for sale, and I’m not going to reprint those here.
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Story time(!). My grandfather was in the coast and geodetic survey (which later became NOAA). He was mapping the Aleutian islands. The mosquitoes were ravenous. Shipmate convinces him to send away for “SureFire mosquito remedy!” from Johnson Smith. (they all knew it was crap, but were bored and did it anyway) Finally arriving by post-exchange the package contained two wood blocks labelled ‘A’ and ‘B’: “Place mosquito on block A, strike smartly with block B”.
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There are as many exploding things as squirting things in the catalog. Again, are there really adults who think this kind of prank is fun?
This helps me contextualize a lot better why H. Beam Piper, in his story “The Day of the Moron”, lists practical jokers among the worst menaces to technological society…
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Great post, Mark! I geek out over vintage novelties. I highly recommend getting your hands on a copy of Kirk Demarais’ book “Mail-Order Mysteries: Real Stuff from Old Comic Book Ads” if you have the chance. It’s been out of print for a while and it’s a bit pricey, but it’s worth every penny.
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Dammit, My home really does need an Aeolipile.
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I got a couple of Johnson Smith catalogs in the mail as recently as 10? 15? years ago. They fairly much overlapped with the things one would find in the Archie McPhee catalog. And the latter had some overlap with the American Science & Surplus catalog, which boasted some of the best copy I’ve ever read, anywhere.
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IIRC, I think a J.S. mail order is where my grandad got his “round tuit”.
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Archie McPhee was my jam when I lived in Seattle! still get American Science and Suplus (that one kinda reminds me of Trader Joe’s monthly cicular)
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I’m old enough to have bought crap from them (and was subsequently on the list for receiving the full catalog), and it was page after page of absolute crap. The most weird and wonderful crap that every kid would have wanted.
As @gyrofrog noted, there was overlap with Archie McPhee and the AS&S catalog (which I’ve purchased from as recently as Christmas time), but add an edge of P.T. Barnum and Caveat Emptor, and some sketchy guy with 4 teeth selling something with a fantastic story out of his car trunk, and that’s kind of what it was.
I was never disappointed with my purchases however crappy they were because they were always a ton of fun.
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As noted, Archie McPhee is still around, both as a mail-order outfit and a brick-and-mortar store in Seattle.
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Hey, from 1971 to 1985 their warehouse was just 20 miles from our house, I didn’t know that until just now.
I remeber buying a giant balloon, a spy telescope and a bunch of magic tricks.
My lawn cutting money never stayed in my pocket very long.
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I remember reading the squirrel monkey story. Yeah, terrible idea to have one as a pet. But I’m really impressed that the kid’s parents were apparently ok with having the monkey at home, after they brought their kid back from the ER. Sounds like he had cool parents.
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I bought a “solar blimp” from there when I was a kid, which was basically a long black trash bag, it would heat up in the sun and rise. It actually worked on a calm sunny day.
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Every comic book reader from the those years remembers the J&S ads. They were fascinating, weird and funny. Even to a little kid, some of the items were clearly ridiculous or had very little chance of living up to their claims or even working but others looked amazing. A friend ordered the miniature camera but it never really worked. Our dreams of becoming spies were dashed but we had a blast convincing our friends that we were taking candid photos of them.
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When I look at the J&S catalog items now, I have to wonder: who made all of these wacky items? Did J&S have them made to order or were they stock items that were available elsewhere?
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