The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 15.3
4,000 CATALOGS: Utah State University’s Outdoor Recreation Archive
Words: Colin Clancy 2024-04-16 08:21:06
Chase Anderson peruses the Outdoor Recreation Archive at Utah State University. Photo: McKay Jensen
The thousands of brands of the outdoor industry sell fly rods, tents and sleeping bags, of course. But they also sell a lifestyle—aspirations of a life outside the workplace.
Nothing about this concept is new. While viewing the Outdoor Recreation Archive, the world’s largest publicly available collection of outdoor gear catalogs dating back to 1900, it’s clear people have long desired to be outside and there have always been businesses to capitalize on that desire. Begun in 2017 as a resource for Utah State University’s history of outdoor products class, it started with a private collector who had 1,200 catalogs dating to the 1960s.
“Looking at the catalog covers, the aesthetics change over time,” Chase Anderson says. As industry relations manager for USU’s outdoor product design and development (OPDD) program, Anderson has studied many of the ORA’s 4,000 catalogs and 6,000 magazines and trade periodicals.
“It’s an interesting study of the art style of the era, but the common thread is always aspirational outdoor imagery,” he continues. “It’s always, ‘I want to get outside, and I want to access these beautiful places,’ whether it’s portrayed in watercolor, or collage, or a crisp, beautiful photograph.”
The early 20th century advertising of Abercrombie & Fitch is a prime example. Their motto at the time, “Where the blazed trail crosses the boulevard,” could be used for many of today’s brands.
Clint Pumphrey, the manuscript curator and co-unit head of special collections at USU, has big aspirations. “We want to make ourselves the go-to archive for outdoor industry history,” he says. “We want to be recognized by historians and designers and industry people as the place that can help preserve the history of the outdoor industry. It’s a pretty impressive collection, but man, there is always something else out there. It continues to grow as we speak.”
The archive’s Instagram following has transformed it from an obscure collection in a university basement to an engaging and culturally relevant showcase interacting with followers daily. Anderson attributes the virality of the archive to both the “gorpcore” trend and the fact that most of this stuff has never been seen online before.
“It’s an interesting study of the art style of the era, but the common thread is always aspirational outdoor imagery.”
The latter illustrates one of the biggest challenges the archive faces: the digitization of this massive amount of content. With boxes of catalogs coming into the archive weekly—and only two students working part time to digitize them—it’s all they can do to scan covers and keep up with requests for specific catalogs from people worldwide. Everything in the archive comes straight from donors—either private individuals or from the companies themselves. Oftentimes it starts with a request for specific materials that sends Anderson and Pumphrey into sleuth mode to track it down.
Much of the collection’s flyfishing content is vintage stuff from brands like L.L. Bean, Eddie Bauer and Abercrombie & Fitch. The archive also has nearly every Patagonia catalog in existence. A holy grail find, according to Pumphrey, would be a donor with 100 years of Orvis catalogs.
“I could try to piecemeal together an Orvis collection on eBay,” he says, “but that would take forever. There are hoarders among all of us, so I have to believe the collection is out there. It’s just a matter of finding them.”
Anderson and Pumphrey also hope the archive can do some good—not only for students in the OPDD program, but also for the outdoor industry as a whole.
“I think the industry is in a self-reflective moment right now, where they’re looking back at the past in terms of the materials that they’ve used, or the diversity of the people they’ve sold clothing to and marketed to,” Pumphrey says. “There’s a lot of interest in understanding that past, and appreciating where the industry has come from, but then trying to correct some of those issues.”
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