Many Ingenious Lovely Things Are Gone

I miss the old Dominion Seed House catalogues. Old seed catalogues generally were a great bit of folk culture. Did you know, it is from them that we get the term “corny jokes”? They were once full of them.

Dominion Seed House did not feature corny jokes, but their product descriptions were always much more interesting that their competitors, like Stokes Seeds. They had their own names for things. Salsify was “vegetable oyster.” Much more informative. Broccoli was “hardy cauliflower.” Cantaloupe was muskmelon. Not as pretty a name, perhaps, but more descriptive. They were selling fantasy, and they understood this: people were reading the catalogue in midwinter, dreaming of their garden next spring.

I miss the old Free Press Weekly out of Winnipeg. A great farm newspaper. Not much in it about farming. I cannot even remember well what was in it; I remember a long fascination with a psychic in Holland. Nothing salacious, nothing phony like Weekly World News, not gossipy, but a taste for the offbeat. Stuff to interest real people, who do not have their heads filled with trivia like politics.

In the same vein, but more recently, I miss those old Loblaw's “President's Choice” fliers put out under Dave Nichol. And the products. Both were full of imagination; presented like little trips around the world.

These were all monuments of Canadian folk culture, and I find no traces online. I pray someone, somewhere, is preserving them.