LOST IN THE JOHNSON SMITH
CATALOG
Certain reading matter from my childhood days seems dreamlike and inexplicable. A class of sub-literature was available by mail for a pittance through little ads in the backs of comic books or magazines like Popular Mechanix. This suggests soft-core pornography, but in those days this literature sought to stimulate a different lust—the lust for strange, exotic things, powers and ideas.
We owned big books by Floyd Clymer that reprinted vintage automobile advertising. Pages and pages of stark black and white print and pictures of cars and accessories, depicting automobiles long gone from the highways, swallowed by the Depression or by Darwinian market processes. Once nearly every self-respecting, Boostering Midwestern town promoted an automobile marque (or several!), named after the founder, a local landmark, a war hero, an animal or a cheery idea. Clymer’s catalogs from auto limbo reprinted ads for the
I pored over these catalogs as avidly as I memorized 3-view silhouettes of WW II airplanes on my deck of spotter cards—who knew? my hometown might be attacked by waves of Italian Caproni bombers! Or I might see an outlandish jellybean from the Roaring Twenties driving down our street in a marigold-yellow Mercer Raceabout. Impress your friends! Know everything about defunct auto makes!
The great-grandfather archive of useless ephemera was the Johnson Smith catalog, a vast book—printed in the same hard lampblack ink Floyd Clymer favored—of teeny ads for. . . what? “Novelties” is a pale and translucent term for the surprising items lining those big pages. Each ad included a tiny woodcut-like illustration, a blurb as brief as a haiku, an order number and a price. Each entry instilled maximum mystery, titillation and enticement, each weensy square a window into an unknown universe of comedy, sublime charms and entertainment. As the copy said, “A million laffs!” If the Sears Roebuck catalog was
Ads ballyhooed itch powder, guaranteed to liven any party (what was it?), devices like the poo-poo cushion (drawing showing man leaping from loudly farting chair), electric shocking ring, lapel daisy with built-in squirter and other primitive devices for practical jokes beneath the bad taste of the Three Stooges or Olsen and Johnson. Each little picture was a graphic punch-line to a joke I yearned to play, substituting friends and family for the cartoon figures. A tiny brass telescope with a naughty picture inside, leaving a telltale black ring around the user’s eye—an uproarious badge of shame. Another little tube bestowed X-ray vision so you could see through clothing, the ultimate in voyeurism.
Many items fell into the realm of magic: steel rings that passed through each other, a tiny ampoule from which to draw yards of silk scarves, a guillotine that severed carrots but spared fingers, card tricks as ancient as the Egyptians. The little pictures showed top-hatted prestidigitators who reminded me of me, entertaining admiring throngs, with magic wand, skirted table, lithely betighted female assistant. I desperately wanted to make a friend disappear or levitate, to create clouds of many-colored smoke. I wanted to project mystery and mastery, to make reality dance to my fluttering hands.
Other amazing skills were offered: a small swazzle-like device that let you THROW YOUR VOICE AND AMAZE YOUR FRIENDS! The picture showed a sample gag—a steamer trunk from which hysterical speech ballooned, “Help! Help! Let me out!” and a jejune amateur ventriloquist leering from hiding. I believed “throwing your voice” was a literal truth—your voice lept (like radio waves) across a distance and emerged elsewhere in the space-time continuum. School and home would benefit if I possessed this magical power. It would not only be funny but immensely powerful: I could make anybody or anything SAY STUFF!
A booklet (cheap!) revealed secrets of hypnotism, so you could dominate people, make them bark like dogs or otherwise humiliate themselves. The illustration showed a sinister figure with lightning-like rays projecting from his fingers, evidently waves of hypno-stuff (like phlogiston) aimed at a hapless victim. His glaring eyes were as big as chestnuts. An even more attractive power: I could make anybody DO STUFF!
Another favorite was a trick for pouring gallons of water into a tiny amphora. Or a multiplying and diminishing set of steel balls. Tantaliizing apparatus shown but not explained. Each time I turned the pages, new desires kindled. It was impossible to choose between attractions, because all were from a parallel universe of conjuring and trickery. Maybe, I speculated daringly, the catalog was a gigantic hoax, a humbug to bilk you of a few dollars. I found other kids who read it but none who had ordered from it. Nowhere in my experience existed antic child ventriloquists, hypnotists or magicians. Nowhere were outbreaks of inexplicable itching or talking steamer trunks. The more I plunged into the tiny type on the fantasy pages the more I felt enmeshed in a vast illusion, an encyclopedia of flim-flammery.
I could not imagine who Johnson and Smith might be—two infinitely clever comic geniuses. They invented and produced a cornucopia of ideas and devices hitherto unknown. They were greater inventors than
The Johnson Smith catalog promised to make me someone I was not, a grown-up gifted with awesome powers, the life of the party, an epic merry prankster and sophisticate, a person in control of life. Like all children, I sought any short-cut to power and control, the wormhole from childhood to adulthood that would let me become my true self, bypassing tiresome years of school, experience, trial and error, tragedy and boredom. Movies and stories promised me happy-ending magic—if you were adventurous and daring you would conquer the inertia of everyday reality, the gluey entropy that reduced joyful possibility to tiresome certainty. Johnson Smith’s big pages promised a cosmos of surprise and variety, of laughter and nonsense. No wonder I longed to be a Johnson Smith acolyte and plunge into that sumptuous world head-first!
I never did. The book was better fiction than fact, a playful fantasy not a utilitarian object. Ordering those gags and gizmos would break the spell, reveal the top-hatted magician as an acne-scourged teenager trying to be popular, the genie of hypnotism a boring fool in badly fitted pyjamas. I was too afraid of disillusionment, of a disappointing package of mingy junk in the mail, not lost dollars from my allowance but lost innocence and wonder. I preferred—and still do—to imagine the Johnson Smith catalog as a platonic Idea, a Book of Books existing in a word-world written by Jorge Luis Borges, listed in the card index of the Library of Babel but chained to its shelf, not checked out or perused by vulgar readers. ###
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