I grew up in a house with lots of magazines and liquor. My father was a buyer for a small chain of supermarkets and those were two of his departments. So we ended up with many free samples, which included complementary magazine subscriptions and an assortment of alcohol. One of my favorite magazines was Family Circle. I didn’t have a favorite liquor.
I read the magazine not for the recipes or the household tips, but for the ads, which included a regular feature on mail-order gift giving. Some of the items advertised were photographed, but many of them were hand-drawn, probably by the magazine as part of the advertising package. All of today’s scans are from Family Circle magazine and date from 1963. Click on any image for a larger version.
These were almost all very inexpensive items of the sort you would get someone out of obligation or desperation. They often were easily personalized with the lucky recipient’s name. Those were the days when you could spend a dollar on something that was hand-lettered by an artist.
Another popular category was the “caddy” or “cozy” or other sort of holder for things we don’t usually think of as needing a holder. If you were really lucky, your gift was both a caddy and personalized with your name.
I suspect that desperate grandparents and aunts were among the purchasers of these mail-order gifts, as many were designed for children.
And where do people get bath toys these days? I haven’t seen a good spouting whale or colored soap pencils in quite some time.
Some items seemed a little too good to be true, like this roll-out vegetable garden and the $3.98 sunken garden pool, complete with water lily.
There was always something for the inquisitive or budding scientist, such as your very own egg incubator and 100 magnets to experiment with. And of course, no household was complete without an Add-O-Matic hand calculator.
Go to page 2 to see Furry Freddie the Freudian Philosopher, the bicycle speedometer Gene longed to buy, and more.
This article was last modified on May 17, 2023
This article was first published on September 24, 2010
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