what is a novelty?

X-ray gogs, the Whoopee Cushion and the Joy Buzzer are some of my favorite Things. We've been selling novelty items for over 90 years, both through our catalogs and through advertisements. When I was a kid, we used to take out full page ads in comic books to show off our best novelties. We even advertised in the very first Superman comic book. I was looking at some of those old ads the other day and that got me wondering...what makes an item a novelty?Dictionary.com1 says a novelty is "an article of trade whose value is chiefly decorative, comic, or the like and whose appeal is often transitory." Okay, that fits pretty well. But I think Wikipedia2 gets closer to the mark, "Novelty items are generally devices that do not fit into another category such as gadgets, by virtue of being impractical, but this distinction is often blurred."

By virtue of being impractical. I like that. Not all Things have to be useful. Sometimes Things can be just plain fun. With that in mind, I thought I'd show you some of my favorite classic novelties and some new spins on old ideas.X-ray Gogs have been around for years. Maybe you even remember the old comic book ads that show a man wearing the gogs and seeming to see through his own hand. Of course, the gogs don't really x-ray anything, but the effect is pretty good. (I can't tell you how they work. You'll have to look that up yourself.) I remember wearing them as a kid, mostly to rile the girls who weren't exactly sure that the specs couldn't see through their clothes.

In the 1930s Alfred Johnson Smith wrote one of the best lines ever written when describing the Whoopee Cushion. He said it, "gives forth noises better imagined than described." (We still use his description.) Today, technology has given us funnier and funnier ways to "give forth" such noises. The Remote Control Fart Machine is one of our bestsellers, for example. Plus we have farting bears, farting gnomes and even a farting keychain for the prankster on-the-go.

Shocking Things have always been popular, too. Invented in 1928, the wind-up Joy Buzzer is still one of my favorite Things. But shocking people has also been enhanced by technology. The Shocking Pen and Shocking Lighter are two of our top pranks. We even have a Shocking MP3 Player.

Not everything has been changed by technology though, some of our staple novelties, like fart powder, fart candy and fake poo haven't changed much over the years and they still cost less than a dollar.

Maybe the value of a novelty is "chiefly comic" and maybe they are "impractical", but they're still Things I couldn't possibly live without.

See you next week,
Bobby