I hope everyone is having a happy holiday season! This week (as you know if you’ve listened to the podcast) I’ve got something a little different planned: a look back at some old catalogs.

For those of you who grew up after the mid-nineties, the Sears Wish Book was a beast of a holiday catalog, weighing in at over 600 pages of STUFF. A lot of it was clothes and housewares (boooooring) but toward the back, there were toys. Pages and pages of toys, all set up in tableaus designed to foster the feeling of want in the hearts of children. When the Wish Book showed up in the mailbox, I would spend what seemed like hours poring over the toy pages, circling catalog numbers in the hopes that Mom, Dad or Santa might see.

A few months ago, Dan Veesenmeyer clued me in that three Wish Books contained entries for D&D stuff, so I just had to track them down. This is the first, the 1982 Wish Book. As you can see, the Sears people curated some classics – your core books, the D&D electronic board game, etc – and some oddities – that binder, which I believe DnD_Daily has shown off not too long ago. The miniatures strike me as an odd inclusion, but you don’t get much more iconic a D&D  knock-off than Milton Bradley’s Dark Tower board game. The weirdest item (and maybe most intriguing, even if it isn’t D&D) is that electronic fortune teller. He goes by the name Taro and I’ve never heard of it but I kind of want one.

I also saw a strange D&D diorama tucked in next to the He-Man toys. Photo is too small for me to really figure out what it is. Anyone have a clue?