[rixrax]

This is awesome! I wish Omega, Zenith, Seiko and other watch manufacturers would do the same and publish their historic catalogs online! And auto manufacturers, and really everyone who is in the kind of business where catalogs like this exists.

[pkaye]

I came upon the Harrods 1912 catalog. Its interesting browse the catalog for what was available back then.

https://archive.org/details/harrods-for-everything-images/mo...

[epiccoleman]

This led me down a pleasing rabbit hole:

* flipping through the pages I stopped with some interest on section for the "Optical Department" (page 84)

* I noticed the pince-nez glasses, and wondered "does pince-nez just mean 'pinch nose'?

* looked up pince-nez on Wikipedia[1], sure enough, pince-nez means "pinch nose".

* there is an interesting section in this article about early glasses [2]

* A citation in this section leads to "Renaissance vision from spectacles to telescopes," (p. 167) helpfully archived on the Internet Archive [3]

* paging through this book leads to a "fairly complete description of horn frame making in a Florentine carnival song of the early sixteenth century." [4] (p.171)

And finally, this "Florentine carnival song" has the following verse:

> Because they are made by

> necromantic artifice and the planets > of Mercury, Jupiter and Mars,

> herbal juices and very secret,

> they make men wise

> when they use these spectacles.

I had no idea of the necromantic powers I was invoking by wearing glasses!

Thanks for the fun diversion!

---

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pince-nez

[2]: > The earliest form of eyewear for which any archaeological record exists comes from the middle of the 15th century. It is a primitive pince-nez...

[3]: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_peIL7hVQUmwC/page/n167/mo...

[4]: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_peIL7hVQUmwC/page/n171/mo...