The Golden Age of Canoes: Mail-Order Catalogs and the Making of North American Wilderness Culture
In the 1920s and 1930s, North American canoe manufacturers produced some of the most compelling commercial art of the interwar period: illustrated mail-order catalogs that sold not merely watercraft, but an entire philosophy of wilderness living. These catalogs — distributed by post to hundreds of thousands of homes — were among the primary instruments through which a generation of North Americans learned to imagine, desire, and pursue the outdoor life.