Ancestry.com, a major family history online service, have published roughly 250 000 pages of the Sears & Roebuck catalog online, covering the timeframe 1896 - 1993. Ancestry is a subscription service, and I am not sure what level of subscription you need to access these pages (I already use it for family history stuff), but it seems hard to beat as a window on everyday life.
Thanks for the tip! Agreed on Sears catalogs, they are a great reference for period household goods, clothing and hardware. So, especially valuable for modeling old interiors. Are the catalogs at Ancestry.com pretty complete for the 30s - 40s and are they downloadable?
Some old Sears catalogs are available inexpensively as reprints. The 1927 catalog was reprinted as a little paperback you can find second hand online for less than 10 bucks. Fun browsing.
Dave
I've got the little paperback reprints for 1905 and 1909. They're cheap and pulpy and hard to read, and about as old as I am.
I've also seen reprints that were about the size of a telephone directory, printed on much better paper, much easier to read.
One thing I found interesting about the old Sears, Roebuck catalogs was how much of their line was marketed under alias, usually based on "Chicago," so local retailers could order from Sears and sell the products at a markup. They had a page or two explaining this in detail.
The scans are full color, around 7.2 Mpix and very sharp. I was able to save as JPEG with no problem.
At the moment this collection is very hard to find, not implemented in the menus yet, but the address I used was
http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=1670
As I mentioned before, you probably need to subscribe to access this, and you need to download a special image viewer (free) to speed up download. Remember, their technology is optimized to download old faded documents where details count..
Worked for me .. but then I'm a subscriber. Still .. rather have the printed book 'in hand' .. :)