Flickr - Old Catalog's Catalog Sets

Old Catalog has sets of various catalogs from the past. It's neat to see how the earlier fashion catalogs (not all of them are about fashion) differ greatly from today's catalogs. Back then, it was all illustration, today it is all photographs of real models. There are a lot of nice illustrations which I really liked. It made (in my opinion anyway) the catalogs more fun. Also, I thought it was interesting that the fashion catalogs from the early 20th century had very busy pages. I lot of images squeezed into one page. I wonder if there was a particular reason to as why (maybe the ink or the paper was expensive?).

Old Catalog's Sets
http://flickr.com/photos/oldcatalogs/sets/

If you are curious to know what was the first US catalog (image below), check out Wikipedia. There is a tad bit of history about other countries too.



Wikipedia Mail Order
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_order