Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 4-4

4 Chicago Tribune ArtsEntertainment Section 4 Thursday, November 30, 2017 The 1992 Sears Wish Book, left, offered an array of CD players and boomboxes. A decade earlier the catalog had plenty of JOSE M. OSORIOCHICAGO TRIBUNE PHOTOS toys for fans of the "Star Wars" movies to choose from. i $oml tllA llOVS 111 My a box of Wish Book was catalog of America Christmas Ch lhJ- M's marled wilk throughout this book oblr or you to sendtoboyutl li hiend or relative lm you to lu-( Imstmn. look for the: rernei tind I twinkling.

ideation list. mail your (M ior Christinas, llllY 1(1 fiiffs lor Service Men PI eying Cordi. Fro'jr frmr CrJ-f K.rr.r all the world Christmas back to this year for the ch l-jr- fniwl Poland no tinselod no Christmas carols members of the Armed Forces In 1942 the Christmas Book urged Americans to send gifts to When he picked up a moment later, I said I heard him. He said Santa would be leaving coal if I called again. I called again.

The day the Wish Book arrived, my mother would drive me to Sears. As she shopped, I would plop onto a couch in the shoe department and study section after section. It was reality TV before reality TV, a kind of window into other people's rumpus rooms, what they wore to bed and what hobbies they pretended to enjoy. There were chapters on wrenches and telescopes, on air hockey and grandfather clocks; there were "Star Wars" action figures I never saw in actual stores, and screenshots of video games that I would never see again, and images of disturbingly cooperative families playing board games. It was never a catalog of reality.

At best it was a preview of future yard sales. But this new Wish Book? A window into the cultural irrelevance of Sears, less a warm retro hug than a slender reminder of the decline of American middle-class expectations. "I applaud the return of the Sears Wish Book, but look, it's probably an insurmountable challenge to try to return the Wish Book to the kind of cultural importance that it once enjoyed with families," said Jason Liebig, creator of Wishbook Web, a vast online archive of old holiday catalogs. "I mean, that America doesn't really exist these days." A decade ago, feeling a Sears, from Page 7 tion the image evokes. "These catalogs, I see now, were part of what we thought was possible." Under our Christmas trees, and long after the tinsel was swept away.

So several weeks ago when Sears announced its first Wish Book in ages, I eagerly awaited my copy, expecting a few hours of shameless nostalgia and consumerist dreaming. Then I got a copy and flipped through its thin 120 pages, and a few minutes later, I set it aside. Of course, I am no longer 11 years old, and my mailbox is stuffed with catalogs I never asked for. But toys, once the heart of a Wish Book, filled just six pages. Tools and tool cases a section I once sped past got a dozen, what once had the informational density of a phone book now appeared airy and anemic.

This new Wish Book was no more extraordinary, overwhelming or magical than an ad circular. Understand, there was a time when I would call Sears every day for weeks, asking whoever happened to pick up the phone when the new Wish Book would arrive. "Try tomorrow," they said. I tried tomorrow, then the tomorrow after that. Once, the person on the other end said he would find out when the Wish Book was arriving.

He put down the phone and I could hear him telling someone I called every day, what a pain I was, etc. HKlZiu Among the big differences between the 1968 and 2017 Sears little nostalgic, Liebig a former X-Men editor for Marvel, copywriter for the toy industry and now TV host for "Food Flashback" on cable's Cooking Channel began scanning catalogs, lovingly assembling the pages into addictive, searchable galleries. "I noticed the kind of stuff you find in a Wish Book is exactly the kind that gets diluted now, by the feed of information that comes endlessly from social media, from every corner of the internet. I guess I wanted a reminder of how powerful our communal experiences with catalogs once felt they're time capsules." Actually, museums of the American middle class. Of the more than 25,000 pages on Wishbook Web, most come from its namesake, and as a history of American cultural change and attitudes, you could do a lot worse: The 1937 catalog offers the Depression-era social ascendance in the form of mincemeat pie.

NOW PLAYING THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST WRITERSTHEATRE.ORG 847-242-6000 Enjoij the Theater Toniqht CHICAGOLAND serving during World War II. ERIN HOOLEYCHICAGO TRIBUNE catalogs is page count. construct new homes; within the first decade of the 20th century, Sears was vast enough to sell both wigs and barber chairs. As recently as 1993, when Sears announced the end of its Wish Book, readers recalled in the Tribune how they had learned to read and dress to simply be by flipping through Sears Wish Book. When the catalog imploded, R.R.

Donnelley Sons, which had printed the Wish Book on East Cermak Road since the 1920s, laid off 660 workers. The kind of jobs that supported a Wish Book. The kind of safety net a shrinking middle class can't rely on now. Sears, once the Amazon of its day, had been infamously slow to change (remarkably, it didn't accept outside credit cards like Visa until 1992), yet the Wish Book was probably doomed anyway, at least since the erosion of union membership and rise of automation weakened the middle class. Today, if the classic Wish Book has a cultural successor, it's not the new Wish Book.

It's the Neiman Marcus Christmas Book. Have you seen this thing? It's also a window into cultural change, and a museum of prosperity, but way better than a Wish Book. There's no disappointment involved, because you couldn't ever afford its $95 coin purses and $615 scarves, even if you wanted them. It's a catalog of future estate sales, a Wish Book with a clever twist: Thanks to the growing income disparity, for most Americans, it's all wish, no gift. cborrellichicagotribune.com Twitter borrelli ti THEATRE DIRECTORY cash: Snowmobiles creep in during the Kennedy administration, and in the 1986 catalog, a full year before the Wall Street crash, the first pages are devoted to furs mink, coyote, fox.

There's truth there, of course. Financial anxiety at the holidays may not be a contemporary concept, yet the income inequality that we know today is not a monster here, lurking just out from view. On the other hand, the Stepford quality of these pages can be unnerving: That perfectly average American who shopped at the middle-class temple of Sears seemingly lived within his or her means always, rarely brushing shoulders with other income brackets or, in catalog after catalog, Italians, Jews, African-Americans not until models of color appear in its pages in the late '60s. (Indeed, Liebig said schoolteachers occasionally contact him, eager to use Wishbook Web to illustrate the subtleties of social change.) The biggest irony, though, is how central decades before the arrival of the Wish Book Sears catalogs had been to development of the country itself, offering a democratic picture of an attainable middle-class urbanity when the nation was quite rural. Covers offered images of cornucopias, spilling forth consumer marvels that only big-city cousins could once find.

The company had moved from Minneapolis to Chicago in 1887, and by the end of the century, it was selling everything from magic lanterns a kind of early home entertainment system to the raw materials and schematics needed to During World War II, amid Gen. MacArthur dolls and Hitler ashtrays, copywriters insert calls for scrap metal alongside sober reminders there will be "no toys this year for the children of Greece and Poland." The "American Art of Today" are not reproductions of '40s abstract expressionism but the landscapes of middlebrow parlors. Vitamins are offered for frayed nerves in 1944. By the '50s, "Make-It-Snow" offers a White Christmas "at record low prices," direct out of an aerosol can. And at the peak of the baby boom, there are large spreads entirely devoted to rocking horses.

In the mid-1960s, in the melancholy muted Wish Book covers, you can read a yearning for tradition at a moment of vast cultural upheaval, but by 1969, preteen models are modeling paisley ascots. There are even a few black models. (The nonsensical motto of the Wish Book that year: "Where uncommon values become the The 1970s catalogs are full of weighdess pursuits, string-art ldts, Super Pong; a doll named Suntan Tuesday Taylor, with a muumuu and VW bus, looks like an ad for sldn cancer. Within a decade, Wish Books, like the country itself, are pulling hard to the right, espousing "old fashioned" holidays meaning, checkerboards made from milk cartons. But what's consistent across each of the decades, and mournful now, is how the pages are not directed at rich or poor but a middle-class American who, presumably, had a steady, unassailable job and, every now and then, a little extra FINAL 4 PERFORMANCES! TONIGHT AT TOMORROW AT ar1 Oriental Theatre 1 800.775.2000 BroadwaylnChicago.com I Groups 10: 312.977.1710 Chamber Opera Chicago presents Amahl and the Night Visitors The Miracle of Light! December 10 17 at 3 The Royal George Theatre Tickets $1 31 2.988.9000 Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier RED VELVET BEGINS TOMORROW! 312.595.56DD www.chicagoshakes.cam FINAL FIVE PERFORMANCES! TONIGHT AT TOMORROW AT Cadillac Palace Theatre 1 000.775.2000 BroadwaylnChicago.com Groups 10: 312.977.1710 "A TRIUMPH!" "PURE DELIGHT" The BOOK of WLLL II I Enjou the Theater Toniqht CHICAGOLAND.