Writing on the Bathroom Wall

Meanwhile... in the midst of painting the outside of the house and remodeling the downstairs kitchen, Kathy's also preparing to hang wallpaper in the two downstairs bathrooms. Good things come in threes, right?

The project started with stripping away the old wallpaper in the ladies room, just off the kitchen. The old wallpaper was a blue duck pattern that you can see here. Then things got weird.

There was another layer of wallpaper behind the duck wallpaper. It looks like an old Sears & Roebuck catalog, and at first we thought it was one of those fake olde tyme reproductions. You know, the kind with the black-and-white advertisements for stiff men's collars, lace-up ladies' shoes, and so forth. But something didn't seem right about it.

For starters, it's backwards. All the text and images are facing the wall. Okay, so maybe the fake old-fashioned wallpaper was designed to look backwards for "style" or so that you wouldn't be tempted to read the bogus ad copy.

But then we noticed that this old "wallpaper" has edges around each page of the faux catalog. It's not wallpaper at all. It's not wide strips. It really is a bunch of individual sheets of paper. Each page measures about 5" x 7" and no two are alike. If it was wallpaper you'd expect the pattern to repeat, but there are no repeats here. Also, the pages are nice and straight near the edges of the walls, as you'd expect, and then they get increasingly crooked as you move into the room. We can also see where the pages overlap each other. I'm starting to think this really is an old catalog with the pages torn out and pasted to the wall.

But if so, why is it backwards? Even catalog pages are (were) printed double-sided, so if you tore out a page and flipped it over, one side would still be facing you, not reversed. These pages all seem to be printed single-sided, and without exception every one is pasted face-down. Very strange.

The top of each page says, "SEARS, ROEBUCK, & CO. Cheapest Supply House on Earth, Chicago, CATALOG No. III." So far Kathy's uncovered pages advertising children's dresses, bicycles, medals/charms, fur coats, furniture, the "book department," men's suits, silverware, and (regrettably) accordions. Every page has a different page number; the highest-numbered one I can find is page #1082. Big book.

We're not sure whether the mystery catalog pages are worth preserving, but the question may be moot. The paper's stuck on really well and we can't scrape it off. So regardless of what it's made of, it's staying on. It seals the plaster and provides a smooth surface for Kathy's new wallpaper. Just another buried mystery for the next generation to solve.