Earlier this year, Action Comics No. 1, the comic book that introduced Superman to the world in 1938, became the most valuable comic in the world, selling for $6 million at auction. The 68-page issue is so ridiculously prized that even loose pages of the comic book have sold for as much as $60,000.
Not too shabby for a comic that cost kids 10 cents back in the day.
Of course, back in the day, there was the Great Depression, an era so bleak that it seemed it would indeed take a superhero to save us. During the Depression, a dime was hard to come by for a kid—or just about anyone else, for that matter. Times were so tough that Bing Crosby’s recording of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” became one of the best-known American songs of the era.
Fortunately for kids—and this was strictly a kid thing—escape was found not only on the front cover of Action Comics No. 1, with Superman lifting a car over his head, but also on the back cover, where “things that you never thought existed” lived.
On the back page of the world’s most valuable comic book—as well as other comic books, Boys’ Life, Popular Mechanics, and Science Digest—kids found novelty nirvana, as offered by Johnson Smith & Co., who promised kids things “you always wanted but never knew where to get.”
That’s right. While Superman flexed for the first time on the cover, Johnson Smith, through their small, cramped, impossible-to-read mail-order ads featuring breathless sales copy and an abundance of exclamation points, promised to make kid dreams come true, but only if the kid dreamed of Whoopee Cushions, X-Ray Glasses, and how to become a ventriloquist.
It was all so bizarrely odd as if Santa Claus was a practical joker with a team of slightly twisted elves at the ready.
Johnson Smith offered Invisible Ink (“used extensively by secret service agents”), Sneezing Powder, Exploding Cigars, Joy Buzzers, Dirty Soap, Fake Vomit, Itching Powder, The World’s Smallest Camera, Garlic Gum and Chameleons (“Shipped by mail live!”).
For the youngster who longed for a more cultured lifestyle, the company offered Yacht Caps, Dance Lessons (with over 101 illustrations!), and the promise of becoming the next tap-dancing Fred Astaire “in only 6 hours” thanks to “a new simplified course by Prof. Wilson.” No one knew who Prof. Wilson was, exactly, but it didn’t really matter because, for only 25 cents, you could be dancing with Ginger Rogers. Yowza!
Of course, if a Yacht Cap and Prof. Wilson’s tutorial couldn’t make a kid dazzling, he could always convince people by other means. Through the company’s “Learn to Hypnotize” instructions, a kid could learn to “make people obey your wishes and commands against their will” and to be “the master of every situation.” All for only 25 cents. Sign me up!
All this quirky fun started in 1914 when Alfred Johnson Smith founded the Johnson Smith & Co. mail-order business in Chicago. Smith launched a catalog selling seeds for growing giant pumpkins, ESP cards, ukuleles, live alligators, rubber knives, and thousands of other items. He described his company as the “Only Concern of Its Kind in America.”
Each issue of the catalog became fatter than the previous one, and by 1929, it had grown to 768 pages.
That glorious 1929 catalog, full of Whoopee Cushion wonder, was reissued as a hardcover edition in 1970, complete with an introduction by Jean Shepherd, an authority on childhood desires. Shepherd is best remembered for the film A Christmas Story, which he narrated and co-scripted, based on his own semiautobiographical stories and childhood longing for a Red Ryder Carbine-action 200-shot Range Model Air Rifle.
In a bit of hyperbole worthy of the catalog itself, Shepherd wrote that the Johnson Smith catalog was part of the American subconscious. “It might well be the Rosetta Stone of American culture,” Shepherd concluded.
After 105 years in business, Johnson Smith & Co. sold its last Rubber Chicken, shutting its doors for good in 2019.
The end came as no real surprise. In truth, the catalog and its cupboard of Dribble Glasses were aimed mostly at boys, and even Johnson Smith knew that that audience would eventually leave them. “They use it until they’re about 16 or 17 years old,” an executive once told a reporter about the catalog. “We lose them when they start getting interested in girls.”
Girls are, of course, the Kryptonite of many a teenage boy—and, it would seem, a novelty gift company. It’s a wonder Superman survived at all.
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