Johnson Smith & Company was founded as a catalog business in Australia in 1906 by Alfred Johnson Smith. It offered an unbelievable variety of quirky gadgets, gimcracks, and gewgaws aimed primarily at the pre-teen and teenage crowd. In 1914 Alfred moved the company to Chicago, Illinois. Several moves followed. In 1923, it moved to Racine, Wisconsin, followed by Detroit in 1936, and then to its current location, in Bradenton, Florida in the early 1980s.

Their 1931 catalog , usually thought of as the 1929, was a monstrous 768 pages. Their line of goods went from custom made suits to elevator shoes, from grand pianos to kazoos, from console radios to crystal radios, from live lion cubs to chameleons, and from books on the classics to midget bibles. And thrown into the mix were puzzles, jokes, jewelry, magic tricks, bicycles, lighters, banks, cigarettes, beer – the list goes on and on.

Over time the catalogs have gotten smaller and the distribution larger and more frequent. The current catalog is usually around 98 pages. The business is still thriving but is now known by several names. Current catalogs are Things You Never Knew Existed, Betty's Attic, Full of Life, and The Lighter Side. Click on the links to visit these sites and see what they have to offer now.