Hot off the Press

Harrods for Everything is the apt title of a huge 1,525-page catalogue from about 1912, produced by the famous London department store which is still in existence today.

Some idea of the vast quantity of items that Harrods stocked or had available to order can be taken from the general index, which runs for 68 pages, five columns to a page. The catalogue illustrates over 15,000 products. While many customers would visit the store, or have their provisions delivered by Harrods’s own fleet of vans that covered London and the outlying suburbs, they also had perfected shopping by telephone – something we think of now as a modern invention. As they put it in their advert (on p. 1524 of the catalogue):

– RING UP –
“WESTERN ONE”
FOR ANYTHING
AT ANY TIME
DAY OR NIGHT

80 MAIN LINES

While you could buy all the sorts of things you would expect in a modern large department store, because of the time period you will find some things that are uncommon in most households now, like churns for making butter.

The Victorians and Edwardians had a penchant for cures for this, that, and the other, with various powders or preparations sold for all manner of ailments, and you could buy things like chloroform or throat pastilles in dozens of varieties, even those containing cocaine!

While most domestic appliances still required manual application, the use of electricity was starting to become more widespread. From a company called Ferranti you could buy electric stoves, fires, and irons. But the high cost of electricity (4d a unit, equivalent to £2/US$2.50 in today’s money), meant the larger houses, hotels, offices, and public buildings often had their own generators. Harrods could supply and fit these, of course.

Looking through the provisions department lists, you will notice examples from brands such as Cadbury’s and Crosse & Blackwell’s (British) or Lindt (Swiss), and you could buy American chewing gum or Californian peaches. But some items stand out from a bygone age like turtle soup, and I was surprised to find okra and pineapples on offer.

To keep to their motto “Harrods for Everything,” you could also hire bands or musicians, plus tents or marquees for outdoor gatherings. You could rent steam, electric, or petrol launches to go down a river, or, if you set your sights further afield, there were “exploring, scientific and shooting expeditions … completely equipped and provisioned for any part of the world.”

Putting Harrods for Everything through Distributed Proofreaders was a mammoth and long-running task, which started sometime in early 2007 with me scanning the original to produce a text that other DP volunteers could work on. While the books we work on sometimes have a few pages of advertisements, this project was ALL advertisements. Pages were split into three to five parts to make proofreading and checking easier. Three rounds of proofreading started in September 2007, and the project did not finish the first formatting round (F1) until March 2010. Fortunately, those volunteers who normally do second-round formatting (F2) were spared Harrods for Everything, as it really needed one person working on it (myself) to achieve a consistent format.

As the assigned post-processor, I worked behind the scenes from 2010 to 2014 preparing the 15,000+ illustrations, but there were long gaps when other commitments prevented me from working on it. I began officially post-processing the text in 2014, but again with many gaps in working on it. It went out for smooth reading (SR) in October 2019 (a round in which DP volunteers read through the project as for pleasure in order to spot remaining errors). It was finally released to Project Gutenberg on the 1st May 2020. Sincere thanks to all who worked on it!

This post was contributed by Eric Hutton, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 1st, 2020 at 12:01 am and is filed under Book Review, Volunteers' Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.