Bennett Brothers Blue Book Catalog Collection

Scope and Contents

This accession of Bennett Brothers, Inc.'s Blue Book Catalogs which cover a wide swath of consumer and mail order history from 1928 to 2018. Product offerings within the catalogs document shifting consumer desires and trends; featuring a wide variety of merchandise including diamonds, jewelry, watches, furs, silver, electronics, cameras, clocks, appliances, luggage, housewares, clothing, sporting equipment, toys and games. The many catalog illustrations of products provide rich visual examples of black and white, early color, and modern four-color printing. Additionally the catalogs document the cost of shipping goods within the United States for almost a century. The shift away in the United States from mail order cataloging can be seen in the decline in page count of the Blue Book catalogs, which began in earnest in 1990 and continued in each year thereafter. From a peak of 968 pages for the 1957 catalog, the last print catalog from 2018 was just 24 pages.

Arrangement

Collection is arranged chronologically.

Biographical / Historical

Founded in 1906, the Bennett Brothers, Inc.'s Blue Book Catalog business got its start after the acquisition of a Diamond, Watch and Jewelry business that was established in 1884. The founding brothers were Eugene C. Bennett, Herbert H. Bennett, and J. Louis Bennett. In 1931 Gail Bennett joined the company. The catalogs featured a wide variety of merchandise including diamonds, jewelry, watches, furs, silver, electronics, cameras, clocks, appliances, luggage, housewares, clothing, sporting equipment, toys and games. The catalogs were primarily sent through the mail to small firms for resale of goods as well as to executives for company and personal use gifts. Before major department stores opened, people would use the catalogs to shop for engagement rings, holiday gifts and other items not readily available in rural and smaller towns. During the peak of mail order business in the United States, some of the catalogs would be hundreds of pages long and featured many black and white and color illustrations.

Historically, Bennett Brothers, Inc. had showrooms and distribution centers in Chicago, Illinois; Mahwah, New Jersey; and in New York, New York. The company was a precursor to the catalog showroom industry of the 1970s and 1980s. While Bennett Brothers, Inc. remained primarily a mail order business, it served as a model for other regional catalog houses which became chains with multiple showroom locations such as Service Merchandise and Best Products.

For more information about catalogs and the mail order industry, see the National Postal Museum's virtual exhibit, America's Mailing Industry, in particular the Industry Segment section, "Catalogs and the Mail Order Industry".

Related Materials

For related materials please see the Trade Literature Collection of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives. The collection contains nearly 500,000 catalogs, technical manuals, advertising brochures, price lists, company histories and related materials representing about 40,000 companies.