How much research is enough? Fiction writers know the dilemma well. We want to know our characters intimately. How did their world look, smell, and feel to them? What did they eat, wear, have in their homes? How did they work, love, observe rituals, doctor themselves?
The books and documents I amassed in researching my novel The River by Starlight fill a seven-foot bookcase. But the book I consulted more than any other, the one I dog-eared with use, cost me all of $1.50.
I found the 1902 Sears Catalogue on a lonely back table at a used book sale. Author Cleveland Amory called it an anthropology lesson, “a view of the American scene at the turn of the century with an excitement and accuracy that would defy the most eminent historian.”
“THE REAL VALUE OF THIS BOOK IS PLAINLY SHOWN IN EVERY PRICE QUOTATION” blares the cover. I learned the array of choices and prices for everything from thimbles to pianos. How credit worked. How it all reflected the larger economic picture of the country. Details from the catalog colored my descriptions of home furnishings, tools, weapons, toiletries, and potions. Of appliances, hay loaders, hobby horses, paint, and fabric colors.
I learned what men, women and children wore in every imaginable situation, and that “fat men usually experience much difficulty getting a shirt in the right shape.” I wrote a frisky scene giving an intimate look at the layers of societally-required undergarments my protagonist dared to forego on a sweltering day. In a charged confrontational scene, we can smell the “overpowering cloud of Le Muguet” enveloping the town’s queen busybody. A gorgeous tortoiseshell hair comb becomes an heirloom and a pair of “ugly cloth-top lace-ups” leads to disaster. We see and feel the fabrics of a prostitute’s costume, a child’s nightgown, a wedding quilt, and the garish handkerchief of the queen snoop’s informant.
Exhilarating as it was to slather on such detail, much was, alas, lost to the delete button. “Cool research,” as one editor called it, that didn’t move the story forward had to go. An example: the reader knows protagonist Annie and sister Jenny shared glasses of lemonade on Jenny’s porch. But they don’t get to see the original version of the scene: Annie sticking a pinkie through a door screen (“handsomer than the cut shows”), opening Jenny’s refrigerator (nope, Sears didn’t call it an icebox) and pouring the lemonade into ruby-stained tumblers while Jenny finishes her work with a white cedar dash butter churn (“peculiarly adapted for milk and butter purposes”) and puts the butter into brass-locked molds (“securing the utmost possible rigidity”).
But by writing those details, I immersed myself in the world in which my characters lived and empathized with its beauties and challenges. Even when deleted, the details remained embedded in the story by virtue of how influenced the thoughts, dialogue, and deeds of the characters.
An ancient, battered catalog—$1.50. Creating a richly faceted portrait of another time—priceless.
Wonderful, Ellen! Thanks for sharing this information. I wouldn’t have ever thought of the Sears Roebuck catalog as a research source. But, truly, it’s a perfect source for what characters would be wearing and using in a specific era. Excellent to know. Thank you.
And not only what people were wearing and using, but how business was conducted in that era. The catalog opens with many pages of tiny type including bank letters, freight classifications, explanations of how to pay under their cash-only policy (money orders okay, stamps not), why they deem some order “unprofitable” to the customer (shipping costs more than the items ordered), discouragement of “unnecessary correspondence” and substitutions, and on and on–practically a whole economics course in practices that largely no longer exist today. In some ways, kinda sad. So you’re going to get yourself an old catalog? They exist on eBay, although probably not for $1.50. 🙂