Someone has scanned and posted online many of the items listed in the 1929 Johnson Smith novelty catalog.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kingpowerci....../detail/

Hmm didn't see those x-ray glasses I always wanted haha. Nice like airship, I love flipping through the old magazines kind of gives an idea of what was going on during that era.

Cool stuff - amazing what passed for acceptable back then such as "Darkey in a Watermelon," etc..

Somebody else has posted a scan of EVERY page of the 1979 Johnson Smith catalog. Compare and contrast:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chinesejetp......2746070/

There are things here that I STILL want...

Although I do find the ethnic humor in the 1929 catalog to be offensive, I find the idea that the poster has claimed copyright on this even more offensive. It is possible to excuse the thoughtlessness of the material in the 1929 catalogue, because it was socially acceptable back then. In fact, it is a cross-section of the things that people found humorous in those days.

Bill, that's mostly the way that Flickr works. It's designed for you to upload original images, so you set a default copyright level on your submissions. While you can change it for individual items, the process is painful enough that many people don't bother.

And, of course, anyone can claim to have a copyright without regard to if they are the rightful holder.

I'm okay laughing at the the comments about the callous indifference to violence and racism that was part of our culture back then - not at the items or mindset which still infects some members of our society today.

Thanks for explaining this.



That's true. However, it reminds me of an incident that occurred to me about half a dozen years ago. I was reading an interview that a well-known magical columnist did of a friend of mine. It appeared on line shortly after the fellow being interviewed passed away. As I read the interview, I began to realize that it wasn't an interview at all. It was a verbatim copy of part of a book I had written about the fellow being interviewed. To add insult to injury, at the end of the interview, he inserted the following:

This article copyright 2001 by X--- X------, but you may quote it if you ask nicely.

Well, I didn't ask nicely. I e-mailed him and called his hand on it. And the people who published the interview pulled it off their web site. They won't ever publish another interview by this fellow.