Looking at your holiday shopping list and scratching your head? Well, perhaps you should take a little inspiration from this midcentury catalog, presenting “America’s newest ideas in gifts.” Note the word choice is newest—they make no promises beyond novelty.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to assign an exact year to this wacky beauty. A little research reveals that Hanover House was quite a catalog powerhouse in the 1980s, for instance, and made it far enough into the new millennium to get onto the internet. According to a glowing June 1999 writeup in the trade publication Multichannel Merchant naming it one of the “10 BEST Catalog Concepts Ever,” the Hanover House brand was launched in 1962 as a general merchandising spinoff from the Lana Lobell dress line and quickly took off.
So presumably we’re looking at something that is technically from the 1960s, but still a product of the cultural era we call “the Fifties.” How can we know this for sure? All the product listings featuring very well-dressed women doing housework. Eat your heart out, Donna Reed.
Of course it’s very important to maintain all your permed, arched-eyebrow perfection, and the humming consumer economy is more than happy to assist.