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Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Great Website for Old Catalogs

WishbookWeb was created in October 2006 to be a place to come and freely view the Christmas catalogs of the past. We've gone out and purchased catalogs, mostly on Ebay. Once we get them, they are carefully disassembled and scanned. This process destroys the binding, but leaves each page free to be scanned as flat as possible. As an example, a 400 page catalog takes roughly eight or nine hours to scan and crop. Most of our catalogs have been scanned at 300dpi and permanently stored as tiff files, although the viewable jpegs on the site are lower resolution than that. Once a catalog is scanned, the loose pages are stored, in case they are needed at a later date.

Catalogs start with the 1940 Sears Christmas catalog, and cover every decade through the 1980s. Guess I can stop buying old catalogs on Ebay, and just use this website.

HT: Ben Cunningham

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