Eleven New Catalogs Added to the Archive!!

It’s mid-March and I’m so excited to announce that today, no less than eleven new catalogs have been added to WishbookWeb!

They are (in order of year):

1948 Sears, 1959 FAO Schwarz, 1967 JCPenney, 1973 Canadian Simpson-Sears, 1975 Eatons, 1977 Sears, 1989 Sears, 1990 JCPenney, 1991 Sears, 1994 JCPenney, and the 1996 JCPenney.

The 1991 Sears Wishbook comes in at a whopping 806 pages, by far the largest of the Christmas catalogs currently found on the site.  With these new additions, the current count on the site stands at fifty-seven complete Christmas catalogs, amounting to 25,617 scanned pages!  Wow!

Head on over the The Catalogs page to check them out!

This latest batch of catalogs comes courtesy of WishbookWeb co-founder (and my good friend), Alan Angerbauer.  Alan’s been working on those scans for some time (they amount to his backlog going back over a year), so please don’t expect that we’ll be adding quite THIS much new content on a regular basis – today’s new catalog additions amount to 5,500 scanned pages!  Even so, we do hope to keep updating and adding to the archive on a regular basis.  I’ve got a good sized backlog of unscanned catalogs to get to here, myself.  So I’d better get back to work.  See you next time!   -Jason

WishbookWeb “2.0” is Here! Tell your friends!

Hi, everyone!  WishbookWeb.com two-point-oh is finally here and ready for you to check it out!!  Jump over to “The Catalogs” page for the catalog navigation screen.

Please consider this a beta relaunch of the new WishbookWeb.com site.  Converting the existing catalogs to the new format has been a long, and at times tedious process, involving over 100 hours of work over the past few months and undoubtedly a few things have fallen through the cracks. There are already items identified that need to be fixed (a couple catalogs are currently missing the last 100 pages – weird, but those should be fixed in the next few days) and other issues will be identified as more and more people get on the site to check it out.  Rather than puzzle over trying to identify every single thing that might be wrong, we chose to get the obvious ones fixed and then invite you all in to play with the new-format site.

Please feel free to comment under this post or if you’d like to get directly in touch, you can always send us an e-mail here at jason@wishbookweb.com.

Thank you for your patience during the recent downtime(s) and for your support of our return.  It is with great excitement that we open the doors of the new site to you.   Have fun and let us know what you think.  Oh, and if you think what we’ve done here is cool, tell you friends!

 

“WishbookWeb 2.0” is Almost Here!!!

Welcome to the soon-to-be-relaunched WishbookWeb.com, or as I’ve been calling it “WishbookWeb 2.0”.  The last couple of months, over one hundred hours of work and processing time have been put into the conversion of the existing catalog content into a new format that will make the catalogs fully text-searchable and mobile-friendly.  This is a huge change and should stand as a launch point for bringing WishbookWeb.com into the modern era, while also inspiring and motivating us to add significantly more vintage catalog content to the site.  We think it’s going to be a lot of fun, and we hope your experience with the new site will be that as well.

The goal has always to make the catalogs freely available to everyone online, and to make them accessible to the most amount of people.  These significant changes serve as a generational upgrade that will make WishbookWeb far more accessible than it has ever been and with the addition of text-search capabiliy, their use should provide far more utility.

That’s it for now.  We are still working on the details to have the site fully back.  Can’t wait to share it with you!
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