How Not to Feel Guilty About Your Pattern Stash

I wasn't intending to post anything today, but I came home to find that some patterns I had ordered from Ebay had arrived. On opening the packet, I was immediately intrigued to find out a bit more about one of them - a Marion Martin mail order pattern from the 1950s. I was unfamiliar with the pattern company but had seen a few patterns from them for sale online. The listing had included a picture of the front of the pattern, but what I also received was the original envelope in which the pattern was dispatched. It was sent from The Pattern Bureau, Fashion Service in New York to a Mrs Don Tuttle of Hornell, New York;

After seeing this, my inner 'museum geek' kicked in, and I set about some Internet research on the pattern company. I found a great set of catalogue scans from a 1950s Anne Adams/Marion Martin on Flickr, which would have been one of the ways for prospective pattern buyer to choose what they wanted.

Using this interesting website, I found out that the Marion Martin Pattern Service was one of several mail order services that was operated by the same parent company (Reader Mail) from different addresses in the same area. It was in existence from 1931 to 1982. The different companies owned by Reader Mail (including Anne Adams also) tended to compete for the same business. The advantage of having different company names was that several adverts could be placed in the same newspaper, cornering the market.

A 1975 interview with Spencer Douglas, Chief Operating Officer of Reader Mail  described him as the;

"president of the world's largest mail-order pattern operation. . . .  For more than 40 years, Douglas' staff of 200 men and women have been turning out thousands of patterns daily for the more than 1,000 newspapers which offer them through their pages, emphasizing that his is a feature service exclusively for newspapers and not retail outlets....Of the millions of pattern orders his firm receives, his employees have the pattern on its way to 75 per cent of the seamstresses the same day 'and the other 25 percent are mailed the next morning.'  He has devised a trade-secret system for sorting the mail which brought postal officials into his plant to take notes."  (source)
 
In an article in the Editor and Publisher the following year,

"Reader Mail was described as 'a newspaper response success story,' and that a single newspaper ad could generate as many as 58,000 responses.  A long-time postal worker at Old Chelsea Station remembers pushing a large, wheeled mail cart across the street at least once a day.  When postal workers found loose coins on the floor, they tossed them into the cart on the assumption they had fallen out of one of the envelopes addressed to the pattern company." (source)

Isn't that interesting? I love finding a bit of history out, sparked off by contact with an object. Today we are so spoiled by having the Internet as an amazing resource to find patterns. It's nice to know that seamstresses in the past, who may not have had a great choice of patterns to buy in their home town, were able to browse catalogues and newspaper adverts to choose patterns. Not only that, but as Mrs Tuttle's pattern is unused, I would say that seamstresses of the past may have been as wooed to buy patterns they never made, as we are today. So don't feel too guilty about those unused patterns lurking in your stash, future seamstresses will be delighted!

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