1945 Magazine Catalog

A souvenir of the era when department stores sold everything, including books and magazines.

This catalog for 1945 subscriptions would have been published in 1944. The emphasis is on red-white-and-blue, and the continued state of war.

Uncle Sam and "Mrs. Uncle Sam" stand beneath a rendering of the cast-iron entrance to Louis Sullivan's Carson Pirie Scott building.

The story of Mrs. Uncle Sam is on the inside cover.

... She was only a baby when her folks build their first rude log cabin at Jamestown. She was in pigtails when Uncle Sam first began to notice her—that cruel winter at Plymouth. He was ready to pop the question the night Cousin Paul Revere rode so furiously down the road to Lexington...

It continues in this vein, from the couple marrying after Yorktown; "a framed copy of the Bill of Rights...the first picture hung on their walls."

There's the crossing the plains and heading off Indians; then on to the 1860s, when Mrs. Sam went "on the battlefield to nurse [Uncle Sam], and his wounded brothers of the South." Next,

She bought Liberty Bonds with their savings during the first World War. She managed wonderfully all through the depression.
Today, she stands in the front line with Uncle Sam—to defend what they built togehter. She knows he needs her now, as never, never before.
...
And Mrs. Uncle Sam faces this resolutely, serenely and free!

We salute you homemakers—mothers and women of America—for you are Mrs. Uncle Sam.

One magazine on offer:


The war would actually end in the summer of 1945, and Time was already pitching post-war life


War or peace, Time was willing as ever to take "news-words," and "boil them down and point them up and connect them together for you..."

Then, as now, considerately sparing readers the work of thinking for themselves.