The Development of Commercial Literacy

Abstract

This article examines the role of Swedish mail-order catalogues in the everyday life of the early twentieth century, and in the development of consumer culture. The study deals with the materiality, content and distribution of the mail-order catalogues as well as their use in everyday life. The case of Åhlén & Holm, a major Swedish mail-order company, and its audience is relevant beyond the national context, since it demonstrates how extensive distribution of and interaction with commercial media can induce a crucial societal change such as the development of consumer culture. Arguing for a ‘media history from below’, the source material consists of responses to a qualitative questionnaire, besides catalogues and other material from the company archive. The result shows that the mediated encounter with Åhlén & Holm provided its audience with a commercial literacy that entailed both an emancipation from the economic, geographical and social constraints of everyday life and a confinement in a commercial world.

KEYWORDS:

• mail order
• catalogue
• media history from below
• early twentieth-century Sweden
• commercial literacy

Introduction

I must not overlook the mail-order catalogues. Especially the voluminous and illustration-rich catalogues from Åhlén & Holm were very important to me in my childhood. They enticed me with thousands of commodities that both existed there on the pages, pictured and described, and awaited in reality. […] I never tired of dreaming of it: it was a link to a larger world, an unlimited source of imaginations between fantasy and reality.¹

We live in a time when distance shopping appears to be more significant than ever. Browsing among commodity representations constitutes a vital, albeit unreflected, part of everyday life. However, commercial enterprises utilising communication infrastructure and media forms to promote, sell and distribute commodities in geographically extensive markets are not a new phenomenon. A crucial historical breakthrough came with early mail-order retailing, emerging in many Western countries in the decades around 1900: Never before had people, independent of gender, age and socioeconomic status, been able to establish links to retailing companies in locations far from their domiciles and thereby gain access to expansive ranges of commodities. And the way they did so was through mediated communication, especially mail-order catalogues.

In previous research, scholars have mainly described historical mail order as a way for rural populations to purchase industrially manufactured commodities from the city, typically from department stores with mail-order divisions.² Instead, I claim that the most important aspect of early mail order was not the distribution of commodities but the distribution of commercial messages. Out of a large catalogue audience, some people did purchase items on offer. However, all audience members received a mediated connection to the company and its presented world of commodities, prices and offers. By familiarising its readers with a seemingly ever-changing, never-ending flow of household commodities, early twentieth-century mail-order catalogues influenced contemporary lifeworlds as well as the continuous growth of a consumer culture. In relation to the concept of media literacy, I suggest the notion of commercial literacy to describe how catalogue readers learnt to interpret and incorporate commercial messages into their everyday lives.³ In this article, I show how the mediated connection to the Swedish mail-order company Åhlén & Holm provided its audience with commercial literacy that entailed both an emancipation from the economic, geographical and social constraints of everyday life as well as a confinement in a commercial world.

Approaching mail order not as retailing or consumption but as mediated communication between a company and its audience means analysing both the contents and reception of mail-order catalogues. Thus, the article argues not only for the relevance of studying commercial messages (advertising) but also for doing ‘media history from below’. Taking an interest in the perspectives of ordinary people (i.e. non-elites) in the past has been termed, most notably, ‘history from below’, ‘history of everyday life’, ‘microhistory’ or the overarching term ‘people’s history’.⁴ While such orientations have been criticised for overemphasising and, consequently, overestimating agency over structure, resistance over power and so on, a dual methodology is applied in this study. I combine material derived from the activities of the mail-order company, mainly catalogues, with responses to a qualitative questionnaire regarding mail-order catalogue experiences in order to acknowledge the agency of individual audience members within the framework dictated by the company.

In the case of early twentieth-century Swedish mail-order catalogues, the ‘history from below’ approach provides previously obscured entries into historical media practices on the countryside, where three out of four Swedes still lived,⁵ especially targeting the understudied relationship between emerging consumer culture and rural everyday life. Much research has examined the new commodity displays in the city during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, particularly in department stores and world fairs.⁶ Less attention has been devoted to contemporary rural contexts and experiencing commodities ‘from a distance’—through mediated representations. Within both advertising history and journalism history, scholars have meritoriously described the lines of development of commercial messages from chiefly institutional perspectives, not least highlighting the constant interdependent relationship between the media and advertising industries.⁷ However, approaches including possible experiences of advertisements are scarce, which has also caused Stefan Schwarzkopf to call for a ‘marketing history from below’.⁸

Nevertheless, despite their omnipresence in many countries from the decades around 1900 until recently, research rarely considers mail-order catalogues in relation to everyday life and historical development.⁹ Even fewer studies approach catalogues explicitly as media practices or incorporate a perspective ‘from below’. An exception is Alexandra Keller’s comparative examination of cinema and mail-order catalogues as common symbols of modernity in the American countryside. She describes both these media practices as ways of learning how to see and appreciate the modern.¹⁰ Contrary to cinema, catalogues, based on their content as well as distribution, brought modernity into homes and households—both spatially and mentally. However, Keller characterises mail-order catalogues as one-way disseminations of modernity from city to country, thereby overlooking the chiefly rural audience’s interpretations and appropriations. In Sweden, practically all early mail-order companies were based in villages or small towns—the only requirement was proximity to a railway station—which makes the notion of an urbanisation of the rural dweller even more inapplicable.

Through an analysis of the materiality, content and distribution but also the use of the widespread early mail-order catalogue, this article provides an adjusted understanding of how developments in the media contributed to the advancement of consumer culture at the beginning of the twentieth century: Seeing that rural inhabitants were extensive producers of and interactors with commercial messages in the early twentieth century, the countryside surfaces as a dynamic setting for the emerging consumer—and advertising—culture. The case of Åhlén & Holm’s catalogues and their audience is relevant beyond the Swedish context. Not only because mail-order catalogues were a feature of everyday life in numerous countries in the early twentieth century, especially important in nations with vast rural territories such as Australia and the US, but also because this case can be understood more broadly as a demonstration of how extensive distribution and interaction with commercial media can induce a crucial societal change such as the development of consumer culture.

The source material consists of Åhlén & Holm’s catalogues, accessed through Lund University Ephemera Collection, as well as other marketing material, registers and internal documents from the company archive in Stockholm. The company was not the first in Sweden to operate through mail order, but the success of Åhlén & Holm and the popularity of its catalogues were unmatched in Sweden during the early twentieth century. Around 200,000 Swedish households received the company catalogue in 1915, and tens of thousands of Swedes acted as local sales agents at the beginning of the century. The studied period ranges from 1899, when Åhlén & Holm was founded, to c. 1930, which corresponds to what has been described as the breakthrough of industrial society in Sweden.¹¹ In order to include the perspective of the audience, I have analysed around 90 responses to a qualitative questionnaire on mail-order catalogue experiences. These questionnaires were sent out by the Nordic Museum in Stockholm in the late 1950s.¹² Apart from the general challenge of grasping historical circumstances through life history narratives, which to some degree is remedied by the large number of responses helping the examiner to separate sporadically reported occurrences and views from recurring ones, the responses have furthermore been approached with a critical awareness of their memory-related aspects. Nonetheless, the material remains unique in providing an insight into how mail-order catalogues were handled and perceived in early twentieth-century everyday life.¹³ Around 20 literary accounts, representing both biographical and fictional works, have completed the understanding of what ideas, expressions and practices surrounded the catalogue in the early twentieth century.¹⁴ Using illustrations from this vast source material, this article examines how catalogues influenced their audience in terms of understanding (1) time and (2) space from a commercial horizon, as well as (3) reading and (4) acting with commodities and commerce at its core.¹⁵

Changing Times, Changing Commodities: The Catalogue as News Medium

As pointed out by James W. Carey, during the nineteenth-century railways and telegraphs made business relations increasingly impersonal and geographically extended. Markets transformed from chiefly being limited in space to essentially having temporal barriers (for example, efficient transports and modern commodities).¹⁶ Time became the main challenge—and opportunity—for commercial organisations in industrial societies. With the early mail-order catalogue, a modern, progressive perception of time was enhanced with a commercial dimension. The audience encountered a medium that, through both its content and distribution, showed the distinctively positive value of the new and of keeping up with the latest in terms of information as well as commodities.

Åhlén & Holm consistently highlighted the news value of the items on offer. The decision to publish an annual catalogue—instead of irregularly dispatched price lists on loose sheets—was motivated by an expanding commodity range.¹⁷ The first such catalogue was issued in 1905 and consisted of 92 pages and 102 types of items. The categories related to every sphere of everyday life as well as to every household member; for instance, clothes, clocks and jewellery; tableware, cooking utensils and scissors; photograph frames, candlesticks and perfumes; pens, letter scales and paper knives; pipes, musical instruments and toys. Over the next few years, the catalogue grew to around 250 pages and over 700 types of items. From the beginning, the company ensured its readers that they would not miss any news ahead, both explicitly by declaring ‘frequently obtaining new commodities’ as a key business principle and implicitly by stating that extra price lists with ‘the latest news’ would be distributed before the next regular catalogue was to be published. Moreover, a separate category last in the catalogue read ‘Various new items, arrived while the catalogue was already in press’. The company showed that it took every measure to keep its audience up to date on available commodities.

From distributing one catalogue per year, in 1910 Åhlén & Holm also started to issue a spring catalogue.¹⁸ Items on offer implied warm weather, outdoor life and a leisurely lifestyle.¹⁹ Each catalogue was now not only linked to a certain year, making it outdated when a new one arrived the next year, but also to a certain season. This halved the intended relevance and lifetime of the commodities (and thus the catalogue). Furthermore, it clarified that demand was season-dependent—you needed different things in summer than in winter. Offers and sales competitions applying to shorter periods were also promoted, which emphasised the relationship between the particular catalogue and ‘its’ period.²⁰ In addition, they granted a sense of urgency—the reader should act without further delay in order not to miss advantageous opportunities.

The content as well as the distribution of Åhlén & Holm’s catalogues stressed the important but ephemeral character of the present. It rhymes with what is typically described as a linear, future-oriented sense of time. With roots in Weberian modernity theories on the rise of rational, methodical economic calculation, it is generally argued that the advent of industrialisation boosted a perception of time as a limited economic resource that both organisations and individuals had to manage. The reality of more people selling their labour, and thus their time, to factories broke away from a pre-industrial ‘cyclical’ sense of time based on the periodic changes in nature—and thereby in work life.²¹ From this perspective, the catalogue fortified the progressive time perception of modernity and brought in commodities. The large and shifting item ranges, but also the media displaying these, both embodied and symbolised the continual changes of industrial society.

However, the case of the early Swedish mail-order catalogue, emerging in a historical context when industrialisation was steadily growing while urbanisation and material welfare were still at a low level, demonstrates a significant encounter between new and old. Questionnaire responses corroborate that catalogue readers valued the newly arrived catalogue for its content and its character as news medium. When respondents were asked to submit old catalogues to the museum, many replied that it was an unfeasible task since the previous catalogue was never saved once the new one had arrived.²² The low status of an aged catalogue was further expressed by the suggestions of certain places and people as possible holders of such items: catalogues could possibly be found ‘thrown away in a rubbish corner’ or ‘in the attic of an old maid or bachelor who has hoarded everything’.²³ On the other hand, practices of recontextualisation and reusing are detectable:

In many homes you could hardly afford to buy anything, but then the catalogues became diversion literature and the children could keep on reading them forever. As the catalogues contained new items, people would also order them out of curiosity.²⁴

The ephemeral materiality and recurrent distribution of the catalogue contributed to uses that were far from transient, but instead corresponded to traditional standards of frugality and recycling. Just as newspapers in the decades around 1900 being reused as material for scrapbooks, wallpaper or food wrapping,²⁵ the mail-order catalogue commonly had an extended lifecycle by way of its paper materiality: ‘When they were too old, one would cut with scissors in them. Lastly, they ended up in the outhouse’.²⁶ Not explicitly stated in this otherwise representative account but pronounced elsewhere is that it was typically the children who made cut-outs once the catalogues were deemed ‘too old’ (implicitly by the adults).²⁷ With time, the sensible uses—and thus users and places of use—changed.

Recontextualisations from a commercial news medium via a collection of images (suitable for cut-outs) into a bundle of paper sheets (alternatives to toilet paper or kitchen stove wood) articulate the meagre economic circumstances facing most Swedes. But the seemingly contradictory meeting between overflow and ephemerality, on the one hand, and scarcity and thrift, on the other, were also expressions of the audience’s appropriations and acquiring of room for manoeuvre.²⁸ Nevertheless, although such recontextualisations of the catalogue brought some freedom from material constraints, they further familiarised the audience with a commercial world. Not only did flows of commodity representations for the first time in history enter Swedish homes, but they were also introduced in everyday domains previously untouched by commercial messages, such as children’s games and lavatory visits.

New Despatialised Reference Points: The Formation of an Imagined National Consumer Community

In the Åhlén & Holm catalogues, part of describing a constantly changing world was a continuous narration of the (positive) company development. In line with contemporary ideals of speed, change and progress,²⁹ as well as notions of rationality brought forward by popular scientific management theory,³⁰ Åhlén & Holm commonly described its growing success in figures, presented in charts or other graphic displays. A recurrently mentioned aspect was the number of expedited packages from 1899 until the current year. During the first five years in business, it went from 290 to 50,866 packages, which made it an effective symbol of the company’s rapid expansion.³¹ Customary were image collages of the shifting Åhlén & Holm premises: from a small wooden cottage in 1899, via various larger buildings, to a grand industrial complex in 1913.³² Together with the swelling and changing range of items, the catalogues told the story not only of a successful company but also implicitly of an expanding industrial society. Moreover, it was a sign of a growing customer base. The catalogue reader was part of a large—Swedish—audience.

Just like with any medium distributed over a vast geographical area in a homogenous form, i.e. the same language, awareness of its distribution provides conditions for an imagined community with the rest of the audience. The mail-order catalogue gave rise to new reference points for its readers beyond physical proximity but ultimately limited by national (language) barriers. Importantly, the commodity was at the centre of this proposed sense of community, as illustrated in a literary account about a rural woman desiring a specific garment:

The shop keeper in Mellansjö firmly refused to sell this item, but there were plenty of brassieres in the big Catalogue from a mail-order company in Stockholm. You just had to send for it and then the package would arrive in the mail.³³

Simply by the item appearing in the catalogue, an idea could take form among other women in other locations (in Sweden) who sought and, perhaps, purchased an identical item. Questionnaire responses support such experiences of being connected to unknown others reading mail-order catalogues.³⁴

During World War I, Åhlén & Holm addressed a national audience when commenting on how rising prices and hindered transports from the surrounding world did not affect the company and its customers: Prices and supply largely stayed the same.³⁵ The continuous character of the catalogue as a news medium was again brought to the fore, as always from its commercial perspective. However, with its uninterrupted publication and unaffected offers throughout the war period, the catalogue also confirmed Sweden as a coherent, safe and stable nation where consumption—and life—could go on as normal.

Åhlén & Holm’s location in the village of Insjön in the Dalarna province was a rhetorical asset when it came to pulling together a national audience. The emergence of romantic nationalism in the late nineteenth century had rendered Dalarna a position as the most ‘authentic’ Swedish region—its nature, culture and even inhabitants were described as antipoles to the urbanity, ephemerality and uncertainty of the new industrial era.³⁶ Displaying their company premises in the beautiful Dalarna landscape, with the occasional inclusion of cultural phenomena such as Midsummer poles or regional costumes, Åhlén & Holm apostrophised an understanding of national community that Swedes had been familiarised with for decades. In addition, the mostly rural locations of the audience’s domiciles were mirrored, with the message that even remote Swedish villages were now potential industrial centres.

Examples from individuals in the borderland between nationalities, such as immigrants and minorities, can further demonstrate how mail-order catalogue usage could create imagined links to people far away or, conversely, connect a person to her hitherto unfamiliar local environment through a suggested catalogue community. From 1906, the American mail-order company Sears Roebuck & Co. included translations into two of the largest immigrant languages (German and Swedish) in its catalogues. While the motivation for the company undoubtedly was to reach more potential customers, Keller observes the possible experience of these translations for the individual immigrant as ‘a sign of life, a chronicling of who else was out there’.³⁷ In contrast, in an autobiographically inspired novel taking place in Canada in the interwar years, the act of reading a catalogue brings the Swedish immigrant closer to her new home. The language offers her a sense of belonging based on her identity as a female, underprivileged settler:

Maria also had a mail-order catalogue, like all other women in Swan River Valley, a voluminous list of everything her heart could ask for […] It suddenly occurred to her that this was an excellent textbook in the English language. Everything that was to be found in this catalogue was closer to the lives of the settlers than what was discussed between Mrs. Brown and Lady Whateley. Here was a decent and simple language, which was about frying pans, long johns and dried fruit. […] Here Maria could for the first time learn a language she needed in Minitonas.³⁸

Thus, the materiality, content and distribution of the early mail-order catalogue brought about new frames of reference not based on spatial proximity, but which were potentially significant to local, everyday life. They shaped imagined communities based on nation, language, gender or class. Unique in its historical context, these despatialised connections circled around commodity offerings. When the catalogue audience was offered a national community, it was a Swedish consumer community. When an author from the Tornedalian minority in the north of Sweden, close to the Finnish border, describes how the importance of religion declined in his childhood environment at the same time as Swedish magazines and, not least, mail-order catalogues started to spread, it is an illustration of how his family became Swedish consumers.³⁹ When it came to reading about and acquiring commodities, they formed part of a Swedish consumer community.

Reading About Commodities: Emancipation and Confinement

The catalogue emerges as an attractive reading material with the commodity at the centre. Compared to other possibilities for rural inhabitants to encounter commodities in the early twentieth century—mainly in country stores and newspaper advertisements—catalogues presented both large and coherent commodity exposures. In the questionnaire responses, a repeated comment was that the local store only carried essential items such as coffee, sugar and herring, whereas the catalogue displayed an extensive range of which many items were ‘new’, both in the sense of up-to-date and of previously unknown to the reader.⁴⁰ However, research has shown that store supplies in Sweden could be substantial and that many items were left unsold.⁴¹ The difference was in representation—the limited space of signposts, windows and shelves could not compete with hundreds of catalogue pages when it came to exposing items on offer. Contrary to physical stores, the catalogue could even display more items than what were actually in supply. Compared with representations in newspaper advertisements, on the other hand, catalogues not only showed a vaster exposure, but also an assembled, arranged one. A parallel can be drawn to a representation form emerging in the mid-nineteenth century—the panorama. A medium in itself, the panorama was more prominently an expression of the contemporary endeavour to collect, organise and ultimately control ‘everything’.⁴² Just like encyclopaedias, world fairs and department stores, mail-order catalogues can be understood in such a context: its form, content and distribution promised both infinity (a never-ending commodity flow) and structure (the arrangement and implied control of commodities based on their novelty as well as type).⁴³

The catalogue readers did not merely find themselves in a stream of commodities but also of people. Keller relates catalogue reading to urban strolling in crowded streets and with its abundance of represented commodities as well as models, something she refers to as a rural flânerie.⁴⁴ During the examined period, the Åhlén & Holm catalogues increasingly included drawings of people, either wearing or using an item or just as adornments. In 1915, the company moved its premises to Stockholm. The same year saw the opening of the first modern department store in Sweden, also in the capital. Perhaps not a coincidence, the subsequent catalogue had the air of populous streets and stores as a multitude of model heads and bodies were shown. For instance, one spread promoting women’s hats featured 28 hat-wearing models with varying gaze directions and facial expressions.⁴⁵ Such an exposure conveyed crowding as well as motion—crucial aspects of strolling in a busy department store with its stream of commodities and passers-by.

Just like the department store, moving into a catalogue was permitted for everyone, free of charge and involved no purchasing demands. As Rosalind H. Williams has phrased it, department store visitors were (and are) primarily ‘an audience to be entertained by commodities, where selling is mingled with amusement, where arousal of free-floating desire is as important as immediate purchase of particular items’.⁴⁶ Finding themselves enjoying the experience of being inside the store, a curious stroller became a returning visitor, eventually buying something. Thus, a crucial step towards a clientele was the formation of a devoted, or in any case regular, audience recurrently seeing items on offer. Mail-order companies were efficient in creating such an audience. Once in contact with Åhlén & Holm, the individual, and thereby the household, was included in the customer register. In comparison with department stores, catalogues were both a more and a less controlled act. Whereas the store visitor was physically visible to staff and other shoppers, the catalogue reader was not. On the other hand, a dispatched catalogue meant that the company possessed the recipient’s name and address and would use these for future publications and other promotions.

The dialectic between liberation and confinement permeated catalogue practices. Numerous questionnaire responses compared early catalogues to ‘book volumes’,⁴⁷ ‘literature’⁴⁸ and ‘bestsellers’⁴⁹ in a historical context characterised by material—and literary—scarcity.⁵⁰ In the households of contracted farm labourers (statare), who were not only among the poorest but also the least autonomous in early twentieth-century rural Sweden, catalogues were ubiquitous alongside the meagre reading offered by traditional media such as hymnbooks, almanacs and chapbooks.⁵¹ In an author’s autobiography relating to a statare upbringing, the boy’s yearning for contacts with an intellectual world gives the catalogue a dual purpose as book substitute and commodity display:

When there was nothing else to read, I turned to mail-order catalogues. I thought that reading—reading as such—was crucial. From one company I also ordered a cap with a white top that from a distance looked like a student’s cap.⁵²

Once again, catalogue recontextualisations are signs of both creative appropriations providing some liberation from everyday life constraints and effective confinements to a commodity world. The quote highlights how the catalogue was not just experienced as a pastime reading material but also as a medium in its proper sense—a link to somewhere else and to people unknown. It potentially left readers with suggestions of other life situations. Crucially, though, it channelled such notions and fantasies into commodity-centred conceptions and dreams.

The induction into a commercial world generated by the catalogue started early in life, as children and adolescents were vital catalogue users. Åhlén & Holm explicitly targeted them by making the toys section in their catalogues extensive and shifting. In addition, the image-rich ephemeral medium supported a playful usage. One respondent described a memorable experience of independence from parental supervision when she purchased a pair of boots from the household catalogue:

I was fifteen years old at the time and wanted to decide for myself what I wanted. […] My big feet became incredibly beautiful. My mother was so afraid that the consumer devil would enter my childish mind. So that time she probably wished I had not gotten hold of the mail-order catalogue and been able to order on my own.⁵³

However, the most striking role of youth in early mail order is not as spectators or consumers, but as active participants responding to the omnipresent offers from the companies to set up local sales agencies. In many cases, this profit-seeking pursuit overlapped everyday life catalogue use:

Åhlén & Holm catalogues were interesting literature for our children, a relaxation from doing homework. Not to mention how exciting it was for them to collect orders from family and friends. The ambition was to gather as many commission vouchers as possible and then to select attractive items from the catalogue.⁵⁴

As the next section discusses further, mail-order agents were educated in the value—also in the literal monetary sense—of staying close to the commodity flow of industrial society.

Commercial Mindsets: The Audience as Entrepreneurial Subjects

With the catalogue as their main tool, mail-order agents promoted the company and its commodities to family, friends and neighbours. Names and addresses of tens of thousands, possibly over one hundred thousand, Swedes are included in Åhlén & Holm’s agent registers from the early twentieth century. These individuals represented over three thousand towns and villages across the nation, with an overrepresentation of rural localities.⁵⁵ While the registers do not show the extent of the agents’ activity levels, a winner announcement from a sales competition in 1910–1911 establishes that over 11,000 Swedes then sold actively for the company.⁵⁶ Considering that Åhlén & Holm was just one of many mail-order businesses engaging local sales agents to act as reselling middlemen in their respective communities, agencies emerge as a crucial feature of early mail order. Questionnaire responses support this statement. Even though the museum did not mention agents in the questionnaire, a majority of respondents described experiences from the decades around 1900 of either being an agent themselves or having met agents.

Not only were numerous Swedes engaged as Åhlén & Holm’s agents, the recruitment was also strikingly broad with regards to social categories. From the start in 1899, newspaper advertisements continuously ended with the succinct phrase ‘agents are accepted’. Åhlén & Holm expressed no requirements regarding age, education or experience, which indicates that the focus was on employing large numbers. The inclusive calls not least resulted in many children and adolescents taking on the task.⁵⁷ Overall, mail-order agencies in the early twentieth century were also pursued by groups besides the typically gainfully employed (i.e. adult, able-bodied men). Women, including married women, were frequently agents, even though the majority were men.⁵⁸ Individuals with restricting health conditions also ran successful agencies from home.⁵⁹ One reason was that, as opposed to other commercial intermediaries in history (e.g. peddlers or ‘drummers’), the mail-order agent did not travel.⁶⁰ Local immersion, not geographical mobility, was a prospect for successful agencies when existing social relations were to be exploited in order to generate income for both the company and the agent. For Åhlén & Holm, commissioning agents was a way of overcoming geographical and sociocultural boundaries in its ambition to create a large, nationwide audience. By way of their intermediary role, agents can even be characterised as embodied extensions of the company’s commercial messages in thousands of Swedish local communities.

However, regulating human activity is obviously more difficult than designing catalogues. Contracting strangers in faraway locations to represent the company constituted a loss of control. After a few years, Åhlén & Holm addressed this dilemma by starting to issue licenses and dispatching instructions where the agent was tutored to operate both as a proactive, creative entrepreneur always looking for sales opportunities in their social life as well as a meticulous office clerk when handling orders.⁶¹ Moreover, with the purpose of raising agents’ activity levels, the company launched sales competitions. While the general company audience was habituated to the recurrent reception of commodity representations through the catalogues, the flow of commodities, offers and figures was even more intense for agents. In a 1909 prize giveaway notice, the number of presents was advertised to be 200,000. The total value of prizes was SEK 300,000, equivalent to EUR 1.6 million today.⁶² Flyers publicising a grand sales contest in 1910 presented not only many but also remarkably valuable prizes such as cars and furniture.⁶³ Large volumes and high values spoke of an affluent, yet seemingly available material world. Furthermore, the many presents implied a large collective of agents, regarded by the company as sufficiently lucrative to deserve such awards. For the individual agent, it provided conditions for experiencing competition as well as a community based on the shared interest and talent for business.

Even though low-selling agents were naturally undesired by Åhlén & Holm, top-performing ones were, in a sense, not ideal either. The winner of the 1910 contest chose to receive his prize in cash instead of the announced car in order to fund his own enterprise, hence leaving his income-bringing mail-order agency to become a competitor.⁶⁴ When Åhlén & Holm during three decades rewarded young successful agents with scholarships, entitling them to a one-year training programme at a renowned Stockholm commerce college, it can be assumed that agencies were eventually abandoned as the professional career advanced.⁶⁵ The rest of the widespread agent community—and sometimes many more Swedes, as competitions and scholarships were announced in newspapers—witnessed, however, how dedicated, profitable mail-order agency work turned into success.

Just like catalogue readers, Åhlén & Holm’s agents were involved in a structure that offered, on the one hand, emancipation from economic, social and geographical constraints and, on the other, confinement to a system of material value and commercial opportunity. A further manifestation of commercial mentalities among audience members in general, not only agents, was the vast correspondence to Åhlén & Holm from individuals presenting their commercial ideas or inventions. For example, in 1907 hundreds of letters described everything from postcard motifs through a ‘secret’ hair dyeing formula to a ready-made gas plant. Others suggested performing services like starting a local branch or travelling the country employing agents.⁶⁶ Letters were commonly polite but at the same time written in a personal, informal, even bold manner when trying to convince and negotiate with the big company. Neither Åhlén & Holm, nor mail order in general, can be attributed for giving rise to commercial mindsets and entrepreneurial initiatives. Yet the activities of the company captured and channelled existing local, individual mentalities—and brought them into a nationwide market and an industrialised society.

Conclusion

By approaching mail-order not as retailing or consumption but as mediated communication, I have attempted to show that the links between Åhlén & Holm and its audience, primarily through catalogues but also agencies, contributed to the development of commercial literacy in early twentieth-century Sweden. The materiality, content and distribution of Åhlén & Holm’s catalogues portrayed an increasingly connected Sweden where commodities flowed and people could participate, consume and even make an income independent of age, gender, economic situation or geographical location. The audience was familiarised with a progressive, commodity-centred conception of time as well as an imagined national consumer community.

However, a crucial aspect for the meanings attributed to any media form is existing local living circumstances. In this study, I have used qualitative questionnaire responses and, to some degree, literary accounts to employ a ‘media history from below’ and explore the role of catalogues in everyday life. Possible objections that the article describes a linear enlightenment or education process have been countered by showing that the audience’s mental worlds permeated catalogue interpretations and practices. When the audience resisted the wear-and-tear ideology, aimed at generating constantly new consumption needs, by using catalogue pages as scrapbook material and lavatory paper, it represented an integration of the new into the old. When innovative audience members proposed their own items to be included in the catalogues, local commercial enterprises were brought into a national market. Consequently, it is more accurate to express the role of the mail-order company as congregating and channelling into an industrial, national market that was already there, rather than giving rise to something new. By scrutinising the mediated encounter from the perspective of both the company and the audience, it is possible to achieve a nuanced picture of both as important historical agents. Instead of viewing mail order as a one-way dissemination of modernity through supposedly rural adoptions of urban consumption patterns, as is the tendency in previous research, the extensive production and the localised reception of commercial messages emerge as the most significant aspects of early Swedish mail order.

In the introduction, I put forward the notion of commercial literacy to explain a historical occurrence: the process in which many Swedes through their mediated links with mail-order companies came to learn about and incorporate everyday life into an increasingly commercialised world. Of course, the concept of learning about commercial logics from a distance (through media) is present in other historical contexts as well; for instance, in relation to early modern travelling merchants. I am inclined to believe, however, that it is especially applicable to the living conditions during early to mid-industrialisation—in most Western countries the decades around 1900—when money and mobility were still meagre resources while commercial messages increasingly flooded everyday life. Developing commercial literacy was an available means to acquire some emancipation from limited living conditions, while at the same time confining the subject to a commercial universe. This process was, evidently, a crucial step towards the consumer culture of the twentieth century.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Lundkvist, Självporträtt av en drömmare, 20.

2 Coopey et al., Mail Order Retailing (UK), Gyáni, “Department Stores,” 213 (Hungary); Hernes, Varens tid (Denmark); Miller, The Bon Marché, 61–2 (France); Mitsuzono, “Mail-Order Retailing” (Japan); Szabó, “Den nya konsumenten” (Sweden); Waller, “Shopping by Post,” 24–8 (Australia); Weber, “Selling Dreams,” 162 (Belgium).

3 One compendious, and often quoted, definition of media literacy reads “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create messages in a variety of forms” (Christ and Potter, “Media Literacy, Media Education,” 7; see also Livingstone and van der Graaf, “Media Literacy”). Generally, scholarly as well as political discussions of media literacy relate to a contemporary (digital) context where the notion is normative and positive; pertaining to the striving for democracy and inclusion, see e.g. UNESCO, Media and Information Literacy.

4 See, for instance, Hitchcock, “A New History from Below”; Lüdtke; The History of Everyday Life; Magnússon and Szijártó, What is Microhistory?; Port, “History from Below.”

5 Hedenborg and Kvarnström, Det svenska samhället 1720–1914, 310.

6 Arnberg and Husz, “From the Great Department Store”; Crossick et al., Cathedrals of Consumption; D’Souza et al., The Invisible Flâneuse; Ekström, Jülich, and Snickars, 1897: Mediehistorier kring Stockholmsutställningen; Greenhalgh, Fair World; Miller, The Bon Marché; Rydell, All the World’s a Fair; Schwartz, Spectacular Realities; Williams, Dream Worlds.

7 Baldasty, The Commercialization of News; Beard, “A History of Advertising”; John and Silberstein-Loeb, Making News; Richards, Commodity Culture; Vinikas, Soft Soap, Hard Sell.

8 Schwarzkopf, “Marketing History from Below.” See also Schwarzkopf, “The Subsiding Sizzle of Advertising History.”

9 The most notable prevalence of scholarly interest in mail-order catalogues is found in the American context where the medium is described as inhabiting the status of a cultural icon (Beck, “Catalogs”; Boorstin, The Americans, 128; Schlereth, “Country Stores, Country Fairs”). On a broader note, Claire L. Jones has shown the importance of catalogues for the material development of the medical profession in the UK in the decades around 1900 (Jones, The Medical Trade Catalogue).

10 Keller, “Disseminations of Modernity.” Several film and media history scholars have similarly drawn parallels from film to other emerging media practices around 1900, such as Friedberg, Window Shopping (shop windows), Schwartz, Spectacular Realities (museum exhibitions and mortuary displays); Snickars, Svensk film (panoramas and postcards).

11 Schön, An Economic History of Modern Sweden, 127.

12 The questionnaire, “Sp207 Postorderkataloger,” is archived at the Nordic Museum, Stockholm. References include the identification number of the questionnaire (Sp207) and of the specific answer (usually EU50XXX). If more than three questionnaire responses support the stated circumstance, the footnote will only include three as examples thereof.

13 For discussions on the advantages as well as challenges of qualitative questionnaires as historical source material, see Hubble, Mass-Observation and Everyday Life, Männistö-Funk, “They Played It on Saturday Nights”; Rivano Eckerdal and Hagström, “Qualitative Questionnaires as a Method”; Sherridan, Street, and Bloome, Writing Ourselves.

14 The literary works represent seven (male) authors, almost all of them born around 1900 and generally identifying as proletarian authors. All translations from Swedish into English regarding both questionnaire responses and literary accounts are my own.

15 The article is based on my PhD thesis on early twentieth-century Swedish mail order (Nilsson, En förbindelse med en större värld).

16 Carey, Communication as Culture, 158–9.

17 “Priskurant å korta varor 1905.”

18 “Sommar-Katalog 1910.”

19 For instance, summer dresses, bicycles, backpacks, books and gauzy window curtains.

20 In the first summer catalogue in 1910, for instance, readers were invited to consider an offer on stamps, valid from May to July, and a sales competition for those who used the catalogue as agents running from May through June (“Sommar-Katalog 1910”).

21 The overall idea was notably established by Thompson in “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism.” For an application to Swedish early twentieth-century rural everyday life, see Frykman and Löfgren, Culture Builders, 13–41.

22 For instance, Sp207, EU50349; Sp207, EU50354; Sp207, EU50945.

23 Sp207, EU50351; Sp207, EU50468.

24 Sp207, EU50436. See also Sp207, EU50347; Sp207, EU50352.

25 Garvey, Writing with Scissors; te Heesen, The Newspaper Clipping; Jarlbrink, Informations- och avfallshantering.

26 Sp207, EU50468.

27 Sp207, EU50403; Sp207, EU50474. For similar stories about children using scissors in and playing with mail-order catalogues in the US, see Keller, “Disseminations of Modernity,” 172.

28 For an elaboration on the concept of recontextualisation, see Miller, Material Culture, 167–75.

29 For instance, Kern, The Culture of Time and Space.

30 Schlereth, “Mail Order Catalogs,” 145.

31 “Priskurant å korta varor 1905.”

32 “Katalog 1913–1914.”

33 Nordh, Offerbäcken, 155. ‘Catalogue’ with a capital C is used consistently in Nordh’s literary work.

34 See, for instance, Sp205, EU50412; Sp207, EU50422.

35 “Katalog nr 35: 1915–1916”; “Katalog nr 36: Våren och sommaren 1916.”

36 Frykman and Löfgren, Culture Builders, 59–61.

37 Keller, “Disseminations of Modernity,” 164.

38 Delblanc, Kanaans Land, 130–1.

39 Pohjanen, Smugglarkungens son, 10.

40 Sp207, EU50403; Sp207, EU50553; Sp207, KU4643.

41 Sandgren, Åt var och en, 30, 138.

42 Comment, The Panorama; Ekström, Representation och materialitet, 151–7. See also Beniger, The Control Revolution.

43 Cf. scholarly literature on lists, such as Eco, The Infinity of Lists and Belknap, The List (‘Lists are adaptable containers that hold information selected from the mind-deep pool of possibility’, 19).

44 Keller, Disseminations of Modernity, 157–8.

45 “Katalog nr 36: Våren och sommaren 1916.”

46 Williams, Dream Worlds, 67.

47 Sp207, EU50468.

48 Sp207, EU50446.

49 Sp207, EU50428.

50 See also Sp207, EU50403; Sp207, EU50409; Sp207, EU50451.

51 Furuland, Statare, 31–2.

52 Lo-Johansson, Analfabeten, 131–2.

53 Sp207, KU4762.

54 Sp207, EU51062.

55 “Agentbok 1,” “Agentbok 2,” no date, D1:7, Åhléns’ Company Archive. Given the extensiveness of these registers, reaching an exact number was impossible.

56 “Meddelande från Åhlén & Holm,” 1912, B3C:1, Åhléns’ Company Archive.

57 Sp207, EU50357; Sp207, EU50416; Sp207, EU50429.

58 The agent registers do not regularly include first names, but in a 1914 sales competition, for instance, 9 out of 40 winners were women (“Åhlén & Holms automobilfärder runt Siljan,” Sverige Runt, no. 14–15, 1914). Questionnaire responses reported both schoolgirls and adult women as agents (Sp207, EU50362; Sp207, EU50412; Sp207, EU50411). Notably, agency work by married women was sometimes discursively hidden under expressions like ‘taking home’ commodities (Sp207, KU4762).

59 Sp207, EU50430; Sp207, EU50468; Sp207, EU50469.

60 Lundqvist, Marknad på väg; Spears, 100 Years on the Road; Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed, 61–3. For a general discussion on historical distribution forms highlighting the decisive role of travelling merchants, see Tamilia, “History of Channels of Distribution.”

61 “Agentfullmakt,” 1908, E2A:1, Åhléns’ Company Archive; “Agentens nettopriskurant å manufakturer, korta varor m. m.: Bihang till katalog 1910–1911,” D6B:1, Åhléns’ Company Archive.

62 “1909–1910 års Presentutdelning,” 1909, B3C:1, Åhléns’ Company Archive.

63 “Stor Premietävlan,” 1910, B3C:1, Åhléns’ Company Archive.

64 “Meddelande från Åhlén & Holm,” 1912, B3C:1, Åhléns’ Company Archive; Sveriges handelskalender 1915; Sp207, EU50355.

65 See, for instance, “Åhlén & Holms handelsstipendium 1914,” Sverige Runt, no. 2, 1914; “Åhlén & Holms handelsstipendium,” Provinstidningen Dalsland, August 2, 1944.

66 Incoming correspondence, E1:2, Åhléns’ Company Archive.