How shopping catalogues shaped our homes and memories

When I one day retire from the Library, above all the other things I did, the development of the nation's collection of home shopping catalogues will be my legacy. Before I explain my interest in these now rare publications and their importance, let us dwell on the brilliance of this cover of the home shopping catalogue I recently acquired for the Library.

The Grattan Autumn/Winter 1981 catalogue is quite atypical for the format (which tends to show a woman or women modelling ladies' fashions) and Grattan have instead gone with a mash-up of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Beryl Cook. It's festive, different, memorable, and inviting. It is in my opinion, difficult to beat.

Learning to compare, contrast and covet

As a child I loved everything about home shopping catalogues. Burlington Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter were important features of my formative years, and I genuinely looked forward to the arrival of them in the house. My mum had a lot of these catalogues coming through the door. Slimmer volumes such as Ambrose Wilson and Damart that kept the momentum going throughout the year, and from the late 1980s onwards an increasing number of smaller catalogues like Lakeland (important), Past Times (captivating), Owl Barn (beguiling in every way), and Stotts of Stowe (vital).

Even today when I visit my mum I look forward to leafing through variant home innovations publications. Not only to update myself on the latest advancements in unscrewing jar lids and humane ways to catch spiders, but to also to note the things my mum has marked up as potential purchases. However, it was the two main home shopping catalogue editions of my childhood that I most anticipated and enjoyed: heavy tomes, filled with everything imaginable.

Although the toys and clothes sections were of most interest, I became fixated for a few years on fitted bed units. During the 1980s, three or four pages would be given over to furniture systems that could surround a double bed: overhead storage; bedside cabinet systems with lights and built in kettles; radios; and clocks. They fascinated me. I imagined being able to command a varied and successful existence without ever having to leave the bed.

Alas, I never had one. But I wanted one because I had seen the possibility of them in the catalogue. Of course, a far more sensible option would be to have a normal bed, wake up, get out of the bed and use the full facilities of your kitchen and living room just a few metres away. But that didn't stop me from looking at what the repayments would be over 17 weeks and wondering how to pitch this to my parents.

After fitted bed units, it was tents that fascinated me, then personal stereos. The options were bamboozling, and the descriptions of the items small by necessity, with most of the page given over to images of the products. I appreciated the way information about personal stereos was presented, especially when it was in a table listing the models and functions (auto-reverse, record, anti-roll, and so on) in neat rows and columns. I spent time with these pages, pouring over the finer points and working out the benefits of Sony over Panasonic.

Speaking 'catalogue' better than anyone else

My connection to home shopping catalogues runs deep. As a child, I was a struggling member of the cub scouts. I could not understand other children's willingness to break their own bones and teeth, or the bones and teeth of others, in dangerous competitive outdoor experiences. I was in the cub scouts nonetheless because absence from it made you even more of a target. What made it bearable was the annual Christmas Webb Ivory catalogue effort.

Webb Ivory was a gift catalogue that was often used by charities and organisations to raise funds through some kind of commission arrangement. Every year, late autumn, each cub was given a catalogue and sent away to raise money by getting friends and family to place orders. To incentivise things, there was a badge on offer to the cub who brought back the highest total cash order.

Even Akela, who found me an underwhelming presence at the best of times, was astonished at the order I came back with. The other cubs might have been better able to climb a rope, but no one had the ability to sell vases and personalised cheque-book wallets to parents, grandparents, and neighbours like I did. My total was in the high hundreds, eclipsing the other cubs by a Very Long Way. It was such an excessively large total that several cubs were suspicious and took an even greater dislike to me, but the simple fact of the matter was that home shopping catalogues was a language I spoke very well. I didn't need anyone's help. Deep down inside they knew this. We kept out of each other's way.

Catalogues as cultural time capsules

If you haven't thought about home shopping catalogues for a while, or if you are younger than I am and have never even heard of them, let me invite you to reflect on what they are. In a single volume, they are a compendium of fashions, and a price index for most available household products. From dresses and sandals to armchairs, ironing board covers, prams, and fishing rods, home shopping catalogues were like an entire department store printed out.

If, in 2026, I was a TV producer or film director or novelist and I was setting my work in 1983, these catalogues would be invaluable. A publication that didn't just show the clothes that the characters would be wearing but also showed me the saucepans they would have had in their kitchen, the calculators they would have been using, and the telephones they would have been answering.

If I was an economics student and wanted to understand inflation, and real-terms salaries of years gone by, knowing how much a leather jacket, a washing machine, or a wristwatch cost would be very helpful. If someone had then produced these at six monthly intervals and kept them, that would turn out to have been a very useful thing indeed.

Furthermore, if I were a social historian, or a historian of commerce, I would see these as an integral part of a move towards 'credit culture'. People today are quite familiar with 'buy now pay later' options and buying using credit and an account. But this is something that only started to emerge in the mid to late 20th century in the form that we understand it today, and home shopping catalogues were extremely important in this shift.

They also evidence the shift from buying things in person from a shop to buying things at a distance, a trajectory that has continued ever since. If you were to print out the Amazon website, it would look like a home shopping catalogue. And for sociology students, there is a whole discussion to be had about the marketing of different catalogues to different socio-economic groups, especially in the 1980s and '90s. The Grattan 1981 cover is different to the Brian Mills cover for a reason.

There is a huge amount going on with these different shopping companies, around aspiration, wealth, and varying levels of disposable income. The fact that many of them belonged to the same parent company reflects similar branding exercises around things like detergents where market segmentation is key to selling.

As a format, you can see the development of the techniques employed to sell not just products, but lifestyles. The earlier catalogues we have in our collection from the late 1950s to the early '70s tend to show the products alone, with some fashions being modelled. By the late 1980s something quite different is happening.

Models in the fashion shoots are in more varied settings such as outdoors, and in holiday locations. On the page below, an entire lifestyle is displayed. It's not only Caxton wall cabinets that are being shown here, but what some might recognise as a classic aspirational 1980s lifestyle. Black furniture, general opulence, a new romance or possible illicit affair. The idea behind this photo I think isn't so that you buy a particular display cabinet, but that you buy the entire scene.

The emotional hit

The research value of home shopping catalogues is clear. But their nostalgic value is incredibly powerful too, at least for the next few decades. When we have shown our collection of these catalogues to people, they often generate a deep emotional response. In one workshop a lady gasped, then choked back tears, before saying "that was my mum's hairdryer". She hadn't seen it for many years, and it opened up a range of memories and emotions.

It has happened a lot. I saw the lemon and grey diagonal striped duvet cover that I used to have, which had completely gone from my memory until I saw it again. As conversation and memory triggers, they have powerful potential. In the Grattan 1981 catalogue I saw Hangman by MB Games and phoned my sister that evening to talk about it. We remembered the feel of the tiles, the haptics of the wheel as it turned, the fonts, everything about it. It was a conversation that would almost certainly not have happened without seeing Hangman again in the toy section of this catalogue. Seeing it brought back the table in the living room that we sat at to play, the smell of stew from the kitchen, the whole domestic scene of our childhood.

And yet, until recently we had no collection to speak of!

Where are all the catalogues?

I started working at the Library in 2002. At some point in my first year it dawned on me that I was working in a building that must have been creaking under the weight of these incredible publications. As a legal deposit library entitled to receive a copy of every publication in the UK and Ireland I couldn't wait to see these amazing things again. Imagine my surprise therefore when I searched for them and found no trace. Crestfallen but still hopeful I asked a colleague where our massive collection of home shopping catalogues was. To my horror we hadn't collected them.

The Legal Deposit Act is an astonishing privilege. Most of my adult life has been spent working with the consequences of this legislation. It gives to the Library, and therefore to the people of Scotland, hundreds of thousands of publications a year, every year, which we then keep forever. It provides us with things we might expect, and unexpected delights in near equal measures. It is the best reflection of human experience that I can think of. A copy of all of the documents that we share as publications, charting our thoughts and experiences and creations.

We appeared to have pretty much everything, except home shopping catalogues. My colleague explained to me that in order to receive a catalogue you had to open up a shopping account with the catalogue firm. Rather than freely available publications, they fell more into the category of club memberships.

I knew this of course. Whereas everyone got sent a telephone directory, not everyone got a catalogue, and you only got a catalogue for the catalogue company you signed up with. Mum got Burlington and Littlewoods. Hilary across the road got Great Universal. The Library does not order washing machines or portable fitness equipment so we had not signed up to a catalogue company as an institution and therefore did not get sent any catalogues. A logical explanation with a devastating consequence.

Years passed. In 2018 I was managing the 20th century published collections and had access to a budget. We were beginning to look at ways to bring our vast ephemera collection to life which prompted me to open up scores of boxes. One of them felt quite heavy. Suspiciously heavy. And there it was: Peter Craig Autum Winter 1989/1990. During the 1980s and 1990s a network of volunteers had collected and sent to us a range of more ephemeral publications. This has resulted in an extraordinarily valuable collection of flyers, posters, newsletters, packaging, and all manner of things that would have missed the typical processes of legal deposit for one reason or another. And one of those brilliant volunteers had had the wherewithal to identify Peter Craig AW 89-90 for what it was: a treasure. I was delighted.

From everyday ephemera to rare treasures

Treasures are very much in the eye of the beholder, but a typical quality of a treasure is its rarity. Home shopping catalogues are curiously rare when you consider how commonplace they were in their heyday in the 1980s and 90s. The reasons for this make sense. They are thick, and flimsy. Made from very thin paper, and almost always paperback, they were difficult to store.

Issued at a time when households typically had a British Telecom phone book, a Yellow Pages phone book, a household may also have had a spring-summer catalogue and an autumn-winter catalogue. With four floppy, thick paperbacks to find room for, there was little ability to build a home archive of these, and more to the point, no sense in doing so.

Why would you want to phone defunct telephone numbers, or order last year's fashions? After 12 months their physical condition would be pretty poor as well, with curled corners and torn or loose pages. Abundant at the time, very few of these publications have survived, and their rarity explains why a catalogue in good condition might sell online for anything from £150 to £250.

Legal deposit covers a vast number of bases of human thought and experience, more than you can probably imagine. We add to this with important purchasing of Scottish texts which we, rather than anywhere else in the world, ought to have. But from time to time, we find a gap that has a unique shape, not necessarily Scottish, but important to who we are, nonetheless.

Home shopping catalogues was one such gap, which I have now plugged for the people of Scotland for the rest of time. We now have a collection of chunky home shopping catalogues spanning 1957 to 2008. Although you can no longer order the products from the catalogues anymore, you can order these publications up in our reading room for your own research purposes, creative inspiration, or simply for the pleasure of browsing through your past.

Akela, I think I deserve another badge.