Naturally, one of the earliest crossroads was in the pages of the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog. A pair of 1979 items are both of their time, in their rudimentary digital tech, and ahead of their time, anticipating the boom in wellness gadgetry we’re living through now.

First there was the Comus C-6 ($35 in 1979, about $160 today). It looks like a calculator, and it can work like a calculator - but flip the switch to DIET and it becomes a dedicated electronic diet coach. You tell it your SHAPE (sex, height, age, pounds, exercise routine) and the Comus C-6 tells you how many calories you’re allowed to eat - or tell it what you’ve eaten and “the computer will assign you enough exercise to work it off,” as the New York Times put it. “If your heart is set on a corned-beef sandwich, say, prepare for 30 minutes of cross-country skiing.”

More than half of the accompanying 40-page manual is a list of calorie counts for common foods; a few more pages are taken up by an “Activity Code Directory”, from “Sitting type activities” like office work and driving, up through “Military Marching w/Rifle & Pack”, “Agricultural Work (Manual)”, and “Disco Dancing”. The Times quotes one alleged customer in the Hammacher store complaining that “It says nothing about love-making,” which does seem like a curious oversight for the hedonistic ‘70s.

To port your computerized caloric allotment from plate to mouth, we also offered an innovative utensil called the Slenderfork ($12.95 in our catalogue, about $59 today). A former hairstylist named Joe Caruso invented it based on the principle that people start feeling full after about 20 minutes of eating. If you eat more slowly, you take in less food during that 20 minutes. So Caruso created a fork with a timer. The tech is simple: a green light that stays on for 6 seconds, during which you may eat, and a red light that stays on for 25, when you’re supposed to chew. Repeat until full.

Did it work? Caruso claimed to have gone from 310 pounds to 180 using it. The Slenderfork certainly captured the imagination of magazine editors, getting coverage everywhere from OMNI to Mademoiselle to Farm Show magazine. It helped that Caruso was handy with a quote, too, dropping bons mots like “I looked like a walking blimp… I was digging my grave with my own fork.”

At the time, we claimed to have sold thousands of Slenderforks. And yet, my search for one today, or even a clear photo of one, has thus far proven fruitless. If anybody out there still minds their waistline with the aid of a Slenderfork, please email me. The gnomes toiling in our underground archives pledge to do a festive dance in your honor.

Alas, though both the Comus and the Slenderfork heralded the fitness-tech future, neither would survive to be part of it. Both faded from the historical record by 1982 or so. But judging by the proliferation of ever-more-complex diet apps, the Comus was onto something. And decades later I would encounter a “smart fork” at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show. Sigh… sometimes it doesn’t pay to be too far ahead of your time.

It’s not quite as small as the Comus or the Slenderfork, but when it comes to workout gear, The Compact 4-Piece Mini Fitness Stepper Set has a rather dainty footprint.

Diminutive underground pranksters have long haunted Germanic folklore, sometimes harassing miners, sometimes leading them to treasure. But we can pin the term “gnome” down to 1567, when the Swiss scientist Paracelsus gave them that name, and confidently declared they were 18 inches tall. You’ve come a long way, science.

In the popular imagination, these mischievous mine-dwellers became conflated with other mythical little people with a reputation for mastery of the mechanical arts. Think of the elves helping the shoemaker in the fairy tale, or later, Disney’s diligent dwarves, whistling while they worked. The widespread presence of garden gnomes probably sealed some mental association between gnomes and yardwork.

Thus it made sense in 1920 to play on this pre-existing conception by naming a new brand of tools after one of these races of carpenters. “Dwarf tools” conjures up a picture of tiny little hammers and picks. There’s something about “Elf tools” that doesn’t ring quite right, either. Thus Hammacher Schlemmer debuted Gnome brand tools. It was the beginning of a beautiful mascotship.

The association took hold quickly and firmly. By 1925, the Washington Herald could refer to “Mr. Schlemmer’s big hardware store, near Union Square, with the cute little gnomes”, with no further explanation. This famous incarnation of the gnomes was gangly, dark-bearded, with slouchy hats - and often accompanied by a little dog whose name is lost to history.

Alas, our shift away from hardware wasn’t good news for our mythical avatars. As tools receded from our catalogues, so did the gnomes, presumably back to their treasure caves. By 1948, when the New York Times reported on our 100th birthday party, the piece noted that “The little advertising gnomes who wielded tools on billboards so well that the houseware concern of Hammacher Schlemmer became world famous have long since gone.”

But gnomes are gnothing if not persistent. When we were taken over by new management in 1955, Hammacher and Schlemmer were not only invited back - President John Gerald brought them into the C-suite.

They’d gained some weight in the intervening years, looking more like stouter garden gnomes than previous. A curly-bearded cartoon version was introduced and would appear countless times in catalogues and advertising. It wasn’t long until the gnomes regained their cover stardom, this time in three-dimensional form.

Of course, they also took on the form of products, from gnome-shaped wine stoppers to wrought-iron gnomes who’d hold your garden tools. Just a few Christmases ago, The Musical Pedaling Gnome rode into immortality with perhaps another example of gnome/elf semiotic intermingling. (No word on whether that was Hammacher or Schlemmer.)

And when we released a children’s version of our catalogue in the 1990’s, that gnome energy was a natural fit, so we called it Gnomenclature. That name was too perfectly ridiculous to let it go to waste, so we revived it for this newsletter, minus the original’s multicolored Comic Sans logo.

Which brings us to 2026. As the latest custodians of Hammacher Schlemmer, we haven’t quite found a job for our old mascots to do, beyond this newsletter’s recycled name. But keep your eyes peeled for those adroit little sprites. They never stay idle for long…

A few miles north along 3rd Avenue, Hammacher Schlemmer HQ was shaking off the winter doldrums with a sunsplashed new catalogue. The Spring/Summer 1976 edition has been uploaded in its entirety to archive.org, which means you can follow along at home as we page through.

Since we’re casually flipping, we’ll start with the back cover. A backyard Gas Barbecue Grill (page 64) was still a novel concept in 1976. This model used “permanent lava rock coals to assure tastier meats without sacrificing flavor or tenderness.” Of course, it wouldn’t be Hammacher if it wasn’t a bit extra. It includes “the rear-mounted Vertigrate for the tastiest rotisserie cooking yet devised,” and the deluxe option checks in at nearly six feet long. We can’t help but wonder about the shipping headaches, but then we’re the online store that offers a Solo Sauna, so who are we to talk?

Our affinity for unorthodox means of transport shows itself in the Water Walkers (p. 19). We confess some doubt as to whether this “buoyant molded polystyrene” footwear actually worked; it has a whiff of Wile E. Coyote physics about it, and the catalogue photo feels like it was hastily snapped just before the model plunged into the drink. More trustworthy if equally indulgent of one’s inner child is the Adult Electric Trike (p. 25). On a single charge, its 12V battery could travel up to 25 miles, which is approximately 24.99 miles farther than you could probably stay upright on the Water Walkers.

“AT LAST! A BREAK THROUGH!” shouts the copy on page 46, heralding the Record-A-Call, “the first automatic answering machine… you may plug into your existing telephone jack.” The length of messages is limited only by the one-hour cassette, and a remote control with voice activation “allows you retrieve your messages from anywhere in the world.” The days of being blissfully unreachable were numbered. What price convenience, o modern man?

Other future household mainstays in the summer of ‘76 catalogue include the Radarange Microwave Oven (“big enough for a 22 lb. turkey”) and the Invento Tap Water Filter (“won’t interfere with the faucet”), both on page 39. Only time will tell which of the innovations currently on offer in our Kitchen & Dining section will someday join the ranks of the indispensables.

For the man who has everything he could ask for, how about some innovations nobody asked for? The Moustache Spoon (p. 32) dates back to Victorian times, here offered in a 22K gold-plated version that “may be carried by fastidious owner to haute cuisine the world over.” The same fussy gent may also flex his testosterone in the Big Daddy Bath Sheet (p. 61), a 3-foot-by-6-foot behemoth of the bathroom embroidered with the eponymous euphonym. Why not? Men contain multitudes.

Fear not, ladies, you haven’t been forgotten… although the emphasis on policing your bodily defects may make you wish you had been. Useful as such page 54 gadgets as the Perma Tweez (“the only no-skin puncture permanent hair remover”) and the De Luxe Callus Eraser (“smooths away roughness without affecting normal skin”) may be, they aren’t much fun, are they?

Because fun is, after all, what summer is about, and the spirit of fun pervades this catalogue’s 64 pages. The “envy of every golfer on the greens,” the Schmeckenbecker Golf Putter (p. 24) has a suspiciously made-up-sounding name and looks like something Rodney Dangerfield would wield in Caddyshack. “It sports a compass, timer, tape line, level, candle and horn,” capturing that sense of the ridiculous that makes the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue worth a perusal even when its products have been unavailable for decades. The ceramic Bulldog Champion on the front cover would doubtless agree. Or at least wouldn’t perceptibly disagree, because he’s ceramic.

Found anything equally noteworthy in the pages of this 50-year-old catalogue? Please, share it in the comments. No find is too pointless!

Granted, among 1929’s contributions to the Great American Songbook, “Hammacher Schlemmer, I Love You” isn’t exactly “Ain’t Misbehavin’” or “Singin’ in the Rain”. Near as we can tell, it was never even recorded until singer Michael Lavine’s 2011 album Lost Broadway, Vol. 3, in a version that’s barely 30 seconds long. The lyrics, in full:

Hammacher Schlemmer, I love you
Roebuck and Sears, I adore you
If you want to buy a bassinet or buy a hog
Don’t be in a fog, use our catalogue

Hammacher Schlemmer, you’re sweet, dear
Hammacher Schlemmer, I repeat, dear
Macy’s and Gimbel’s have plenty of thimbles
But I love you

If “Hammacher Schlemmer, I Love You” has fallen short of immortality, the show it was part of, The Little Show, was the start of something big. A few somethings big, actually. At a time when the gaudy spectacles of producer Florenz Ziegfeld ruled the Great White Way, this humble show put the emphasis on “wit, humor and intelligence”, as the New York Times review put it. Time compared it to “an animated issue of such smart charts as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker… gathered by clever Manhattanites from the fancies, satires, slap-sticks of their native city.”

The comic lead, Fred Allen, would shortly become one of the biggest stars of the Golden Age of Radio, with a cutting sarcasm and brainy absurdity that was well ahead of his time. His old show remains legitimately funny lo, these many years later.

The minds behind “Hammacher Schlemmer, I Love You” were the songwriting team of lyricist Howard Dietz and composer Arthur Schwartz, writing together for the first time. Fred Allen biographer Robert Taylor notes that the title plays on another popular song of the time, “Woman Disputed, I Love You”, even if it doesn’t lift the tune wholesale for a full parody of the “Weird” Al Yankovic school.

The Little Show was far from the last Dietz and Schwartz collaboration. Over the next 30 years, the pair would team up on ten more shows, most notably The Band Wagon, with songs like “That’s Entertainment” and “Dancing in the Dark”. That’s company we don’t mind keeping.

Hammacher Schlemmer, at this point, was still in our hardware era. The Times called this tune “the maudlin, sentimental theme song of our foremost hardware merchants”. Taylor says it “encapsulated the revue’s droll, worldly attitude” with “the anvil beat of the name of the New York hardware firm”.

We love the fact that almost a century ago, we were already known as the place to get anything from a bassinet to a hog - and for the perception that our prices were on the luxurious side (”I repeat, dear”). We’ve tried to do a little something about the latter, but alas, we are at the moment out of stock on hogs.

Mostly, we appreciate that when a great tunesmithing duo composed a paean to mail-order shopping, Hammacher Schlemmer was the first name they reached for. Whatever happened to those Roebuck and Sears fellows, do you suppose?

You can’t hear “Hammacher Schlemmer, I Love You” on the Broadway stage, but you can stream it to the Any Music Format Stereo.

Those carefree days of yore… weren’t always so carefree. Autumn of 1961 was a particularly nerve-wracked time even by anxious Cold War standards. The cement had scarcely finished drying on the Berlin Wall before US and Soviet tanks would face off at the Brandenburg Gate, teetering on the edge of war for two days in late October. Closer to home, the political temperature in the Caribbean was still blistering after the US’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April. The public mood was jittery.

In this tension, Hammacher Schlemmer chairman Dominic Tampone saw opportunity. A market for home fallout shelters had sprung up almost as soon as the last war ended. Now seemed like the right time for Hammacher to get into the act - and for the born showman Tampone, then only two years in the top job, to put his stamp on the company.

“Rather than a hole in the ground”

A model survival shelter was set up on the fifth floor of the Hammacher Schlemmer store at 145 E. 57th St. in Manhattan. In just as significant an investment, a two-page advertising spread in the Sunday New York Times was devoted to these “Shelters for Living”.

But of course, these weren’t just any shelters. “Since there’s only an outside chance that the room will be needed for a national emergency,” Tampone later said to a Times reporter, “why not build a room with emergency features that will add a comfortable and enjoyable living space to the house? A rumpus room, or a library-living room, or whatever suits the family.”

“This makes more psychological sense. If it has to be used for emergency, it is better to have a room the family is used to enjoying, rather than a hole in the ground to crawl into.”

That’s exactly the angle that Hammacher’s shelter ads took. “Ideal as a den, study, or guest room,” these were “professionally planned, custom-made safety shelters which can also be used and enjoyed day-by-day, all the year around.” Alas, the only photos we can find are the grainy ones from the ads. (If anyone out there has any more, please email this author!) On that evidence, they do indeed look pretty much like a midcentury rumpus room, aside from the foot-thick walls.

“Plan for pleasant living”

With typical Hammacher attention to detail, the ad lists the model shelter’s brand-name finishes, from walls covered in “US Plywood’s Kalistron plastic-coated fabric” to the floor of “Ivory Amtico vinyl by American Biltrite Rubber” with “contrasting interwoven stripes in Nubian Brown.” Noted interior decorator Barbara Dorn “has created a Family-Library-Music room within stout, scientifically engineered walls, that is a beautiful addition to any family’s plan for pleasant living.”

Should the living turn somewhat less than pleasant, the shelter “protects from radioactive fall-out” along with more prosaic disasters like hurricanes. “All Shelters for Living construction is bonded by a national insurance company to meet up-to-date specifications of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization.”

Of course, this being Hammacher, the gadgets take center stage. With a reputed total price of $20,000 (about $215,000 today) putting this shelter out of reach of anyone this side of the Vanderbilts, the real value of the model shelter is as a display setting for the much more affordable accoutrements to the coming apocalypse.

A pocket radiation detector would have set you back $24.95, while a more full-featured model rang up at $49.95. A Sony cordless TV with 8” screen was $249.95, assuming there’d still be anything on worth watching.

A basic chemical toilet was $29.95, but for those nuclear survivors of more refined disposition, a “Bath-O-Lett” - a shower, sink, and toilet in a closet - was a steal at $499.50. A similarly conceived Dwyer compact kitchen came in at $535 for a sink, two-burner stove, and 4 cubic-foot refrigerator. As with the shelters themselves, the prices for the air conditioner and generator were available by inquiry only. (Multiply all these prices by about 11 to get a rough estmate of cost in today’s dollars. We didn’t want to cram too many numbers in here.)

“The Tiffany’s of civil defense”

Was it a success? In truth, we came late to the party. By the mid-1960s, the shelter’s half-life was fading: a City of Houston clerk reported in 1965 that the city hadn’t received a building application for a home fallout shelter for over a year. The fad had always been more sound and fury than substance in any case, with perhaps only 200,000 home shelters ever being built in the entire country.

So Hammacher Schlemmer was never going to get rich in the shelter business. But in the terms that were probably more important to Tampone - publicity - the model shelter did its job.

The irony of a luxury fallout shelter was irresistible. Hundreds of newspapers across the country took note. Even if the coverage often struck a sardonic note - star syndicated columnist James Reston called us “the Tiffany’s of civil defense”, and said the portable TV would be ideal “to catch all those late late late shows during the Soviet air raids” - we sense that Tampone was probably in on the joke.

But was the whole thing in bad taste? “A few people were shocked at the idea of Hammacher Schlemmer’s advertising shelters and wrote me in very strong terms,” Tampone told the Times. “I was very sorry about it... I should have known it was a controversial subject-it made me quite despondent.” But he went on to say that the favorable response went beyond anything he had imagined. We’re sure the impish impresario Dominic Tampone was anything but despondent about that.

Sorry, Shelters for Living are currently out of stock indefinitely. But The World’s First Breath Meditation Game Tool can help you find peace amidst today’s anxieties.

There’s nobody we’d trust more with that delicate operation than Louie Mantia. He’s designed for Apple, Disney, Pixar, Nike, Target, and literally too many more household names to list here. With his design partner Luka Grafera, Louie runs Parakeet, a design studio that created many of the app icons you’ve used today.

Of course, we adore the logo Louie and Luka created. We think it captures both the deep history and the lighthearted sense of fun that sum up Hammacher Schlemmer. I talked to Louie about how they went about creating what we hope will be the definitive Hammacher logo for years to come.

Gnomenclature: Hammacher Schlemmer has been around since 1848 and has a well-defined brand, but never maintained a specific visual identity for very long. So I’m curious how you went about tackling the assignment to do something that would sum up the visual history, when that visual history was kind of all over the place.

Louie: Yeah. So they’d been publishing catalogs for a really long time and some of those early ones were just, like, tools and stuff. It hit its stride like somewhere in the 1960s to the 1980s, you know? Before the ‘60s, there was not really, as you said, a strong visual identity. Whatever the typeface du jour was, that’s what they were using. But in the ‘60s to the ‘80s, on their catalogs, they had this logo that was interesting to me. It was kind of bold, it was a little scripty. For, I think, a lot of people, that ‘80s logo especially was when they loved it. So we started there.

G: And then you also incorporated a couple of other little touches. Talk about those details a little bit.

L: Yeah, so there were some little quirks, especially in the ‘60s logo. There was this funky A, which was kind of really cute.

There was also this ER ligature (when two letters are connected, as in cursive writing - ed.) which made no sense for that ‘60s version. It was just this weird scripty thing. It didn’t look like everything else. Especially the R part of it was just like a very cursive R. When Luka and I were drawing this, we were just like, is there a nice way to make a ligature in the style of what they were going for in the ‘60s and ‘80s? There was an aesthetic there with the rest of the word mark. Can we do something that was like that?

We found that, of course, “Hammacher” and “Schlemmer” actually have a lot of the same letters. It’s not that many [different] letters total in the whole logo, you know? So we actually had really fun opportunities. There’s a CH in both of the words. There’s an ER in both of the words. So there was an opportunity to have a CH ligature, an EM ligature, an ER ligature, where they all just look natural when all written out like that.

One thing that we really wanted to keep was having that really high X height. Like all of those lowercase letters shouldn’t be that different from the capital letters because it is a long name. If you have a really short x height on there, you lose a lot of space in there, communicating this name.

So we thought with that, having the quirky A, and having the ligature in there, it felt like it was from both of those eras, the ‘60s and the ‘80s.

G: Tell me a little bit about that A. What did you think when you saw that?

L: Well, I think it’s really fun and quirky. I was just like, oh God, I don’t know, can we get away with doing that sort of thing? And we tried a few A’s when we sketched them out. There’s this classic like double-story A, you know, and we thought, well, maybe we should do that because that’s a little safer, that’s a little bit more readable.

But there’s something that kind of happens with a wordmark. There’s this bug in my brain, I think it’s Herb Lubalin, like he’s a famous type designer and graphic designer. And he said something like “sometimes you have to sacrifice legibility for impact.” I really think about that a lot, especially when it comes to this kind of logo type. These are long words, half of everyone is gonna probably pronounce them wrong anyway. Actually how readable does this need to be? How legible does this need to be? Is it okay? Like, how far can you push this letter, like, can we use an A that looks like that? Is it too weird? When I looked at it the first time, I’m like, I can read it. I know what it says. So maybe it’s okay if that’s the one little quirky part of it.

G: Yeah, if you plucked that A out of there, and just you were looking at it alone, you might not know that it was an A, but it works perfectly.

Right. Is that a capital G? It could be other letters in other contexts, I think.

G: Were there any other directions that you explored and ultimately decided not to go with?

L: When we looked at that ‘60s to ‘80s kind of area, there’s a few paths you can take from it. You can make it a little bit more slanty, right? Like there’s something about like the H in the ‘60s look that’s interesting, like it has a diagonal leg. The M doesn’t, which is weird. So we made it so that it did, but then we’re like, should some of the others letters be slanty too? Should the C and the E, should those like skew a little bit? Is that fun?

We had like five, I think, general directions, but they weren’t terribly different. When you look at all of these sorts of things, you can see where they all came from. You can see the center point of where they all could be. So they’re all just like, how much do we want to go in this direction? How much do we want to go in this direction? They’re not that far off.

G: So then we arrive at the new logo. Not to get too abstract, but I’d like just to hear about what you think the values or the feeling that it embodies are.

L: Yeah, so that ‘60s-’80s thing we keep talking about here, Luka and I knew that that was really important to retain that. But I think there’s something timeless about this. It is a modern interpretation of those older logos, it’s not too far away. Anyone that knew those logos or knew those catalogs from that time will look at this and it will feel familiar to them in a way that the previous Hammacher logo didn’t.

I feel like this is kind of going back to closer to what people have in their mind. Maybe even this is almost the platonic ideal of what it was, or what it should be. And I really think that it feels like it belongs on a catalog, you know what I mean? It feels like that’s where it should be.

G: Thank you for going into this. As soon as I saw the logo, I was like, yeah, this is it, it just fits. That’s what it’s supposed to be.

L: Very few brands have 180 years or whatever of history. This is a unique thing that I think is really cool. We don’t often get to make logos for companies that old. I mean, not many companies even exist that are that old, you know? It’s a rare opportunity.

Ah, and there’s our spiffy new logo in situ, in its single-line variant. See it firsthand and celebrate another design classic in our Commodore 64 Ultimate event.

And so they did, as seen in the 1962 piece we quoted in last week’s Beatles story. But what of the New Yorker‘s more mirthsome face: its famously droll single-panel cartoons?

Indeed, the magazine made Hammacher Schlemmer the target of its graphical japery on three occasions that we know of. First came this piece in the March 19, 1966 issue by the legendary Robert Day:

“Only that crazy Hammacher Schlemmer could come up with a way-out invention like this!” seems to be the cartoon’s point. From our vantage some 60 years later, when squirrel-proof bird feeders are standard issue in the most utilitarian exurban hardware emporium, the sense of ridiculousness in this cartoon feels muted to the point of disappearing. It just goes to show you that today’s outlandish innovation is tomorrow’s ho-hum mundanity - like the pop-up toaster and the electric toothbrush, also first popularized under our auspices.

Twenty-seven years later, the New Yorker toted its chuckle-bucket back to our well for this 1993 cartoon by another titan of the form, Roz Chast:

Here Chast does us the honor of putting Hammacher Schlemmer in the same company as two other icons of 20th century catalog retail, L.L.Bean and FAO Schwarz. Three anachronistically garbed Wise Men peruse all our pages in search of the contemporary equivalent of frankincense and myrrh.

Finally, in 2011 came this archivally themed panel from Nick Downes:

A smoking-jacketed eminence shows off his library of Hammacher Schlemmer catalogs in what is either an ironic contrast between the opulence of the leather-bound volumes and the promotional ephemera inside, or a comment on the perceived affluence of the Hammacher audience and the esteem in which they held the catalog. Or maybe just a funny gag.

In any case, we wouldn’t mind such a library of our own. The Hammacher archives have been scattered hither and yon through various management changes, and old catalogs have proven stubbornly hard to find. (If you have any you’d be willing to part with, contact this bureau directly and let’s see if we can’t work out an arrangement.)

Thus far, Downes has had the last laugh in the New Yorker‘s pages. It remains to be seen whether Hammacher Schlemmer can once again rise to the prominence worthy of a skewering by their cartoonists’ pens. We assure you, we’re doing our best. If you happen to know any Magi, send them our way.

Alas, our ties to New York have loosened in recent years. So we fire up the Italian Countertop Pizza Oven every time we long for a taste of home. And yes, we fold every slice to eat it.

What makes me, as the writer with that assignment, positively salivate is all the ways Hammacher Schlemmer connected to the very heights of pop culture through the 20th century. Those heights don’t get much higher than the Beatles. And it’s just about possible that we inadvertently contributed to the breakup of the greatest band of all time. Oops.

“It blinks and that’s all”

“It’s for the man who wants nothing and is ready to pay a good, stiff price for it,” Hammacher Schlemmer president Dominic Tampone told the New Yorker in 1962. He was talking about the Nothing Box, a six-pound metal box festooned with eight small lights that blinked in a random, meaningless sequence. “Sells for twenty-five dollars,” he continued (about $265 today), “and we expect to dispose of a thousand of them by Christmas Day.”

The catalog copy for the Nothing Box stresses its complete lack of features or, indeed, purpose. “It blinks and that’s all… Let us warn you that unless you use an axe you can’t turn it off. It will keep on winking its 8 eyes in no recognizable pattern and for no apparent reason for nearly a year. Then it’s dead as a mackeral and you can’t get it fixed.”

The New Yorker had questions. What else did it do? Nothing. What did it all mean? Nothing. What was the point? The fun of wondering what the point is, of letting your mind conjure up its own narrative about what’s going on. “The box seems to give back every bit as much as you put into it,” Tampone said. “I find myself talking to it now and then, and the lights seem to respond. In my imagination, it tells me what’s doing on the main floor, the second floor, the third, and so on. It gives an executive like me an executive feeling—a sense of being in charge, of being on top of things.”

As Hammacher Schlemmer’s deepest excursion into pure dada absurdism, the Nothing Box was years ahead of its time. And it would soon attract the attention of another famous creative innovator with a taste for the silly and surreal.

Along comes a guru

John Lennon was captivated. One of the “kinetic light sculptures” on display at the Indica Gallery in London in early 1966 was a simple box with eight flashing lights. This “Nothing Box” tickled the famed Beatle’s sense of absurdity and he bought one on the spot. One of his friends, either Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones or gallery owner John Dunbar, introduced him to the (supposed) artist, Yannis Alexis Mardas, or Alex for short.

The 23-year-old son of a Greek military officer turned on his apparently considerable charm. Lennon was impressed by Mardas’s big ideas, like wallpaper with speakers built into it, or a typewriter that could automatically transcribe music - all redolent of the far-out early-psychedelic atmosphere of Swinging London. He dubbed Mardas “Magic Alex”, called him his “guru”, and started spending hours at a time tripping on LSD and staring at the Nothing Box, which numerous stories ever since have credited as a Mardas invention.

But in photos of Lennon posing with his Nothing Box, it’s identical to the one in Hammacher’s catalog, down to each rivet. Nothing about Magic Alex’s past or future endeavors (more on that in a moment) would indicate he had the technical knowledge or fabrication skill to even craft a knockoff, let alone invent it himself.

If there’s any doubt about the provenance of Lennon’s Nothing Box, in a February 1966 New York Times story, Dominic Tampone tells the paper that Hammacher Schlemmer sent six Nothing Boxes to the Beatles. In any case, two things seem clear: John Lennon’s Nothing Box came from Hammacher Schlemmer, and he (and others) gave Alex Mardas the credit for it.

That matters because the Nothing Box was Mardas’s entree into the world of the Beatles. Most of the band treated him with casual amusement. “I thought he was just some guy with interesting ideas,” Paul McCartney said. But for Lennon, Magic Alex became a ubiquitous tag-along, from the recording studio to family vacations. In a matter of months, Mardas went from a semi-employed TV repairman to the personal guru of one of the biggest stars in the world,

In 1968, the Beatles launched Apple Corps, their loosely utopian “company”. Magic Alex was hired to head up Apple Electronics despite his proud lack of any technical expertise. “Now I’m doing electronics. Maybe next year, I make films or poems,” he said. “I have no formal training in any of these, but this is irrelevant.” Ideas like color-changing paint or a “robot housewife” sounded reasonable in the chemically-enhanced carnival atmosphere of Apple Corps. Mardas’s repeated and expensive failures to deliver any of his trippy visions were just part of the show.

“From bad to worse”

More serious was Mardas’s complete inability to build even a rudimentary recording studio. His previous unrealized inventions were trifles: who really cared if he couldn’t install an “artificial sun” over the Apple Boutique? But the Beatles were planning their recording career around Mardas’s promise to build a “72-track studio” (when the state of the art was eight tracks) at Apple Corps headquarters. This was serious. Without more hit Beatles records, the whole enterprise would fall apart.

After months of construction and hundreds of thousands of pounds spent, the studio was “the biggest disaster of all time,” in George Harrison’s words. It lacked basics like soundproofing and cable ports between the studio and the booth. The heating and cooling systems roared loudly enough to be captured on tape. The disaster site was only made semi-usable when the band’s longtime producer, George Martin, quickly had some actual recording gear installed.

By now even Lennon was running out of patience for Mardas’s antics. “I brought in Magic Alex and things went from bad to worse,” he would later ruefully admit. When skull-cracking old-school manager Allen Klein took over the Beatles’ affairs, Magic Alex was one of the first to go. Of course, the Beatles themselves would collapse not long after, into a sordid mess of feuds and lawsuits. The financial disaster that was Apple Corps was at the center of this sad coda to the Beatles’ story.

Maybe the Nothing Box did have one practical use: as the calling card for a conman. And while Magic Alex didn’t accomplish anything much, he did contribute mightily to the financial crisis and general chaos that strained the Beatles past the breaking point. Too bad for the rest of us that John Lennon didn’t get his Nothing Box direct from the source.

Alas, we don’t have any more Nothing Boxes in stock. But denizens of the intersection of technology and absurdity might enjoy The Canine Communication Push Buttons. They’re even more absurd if you don’t have a dog.

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