Beginning with the first mail order catalog in the 1890s, people have turned pages to weave together images of the perfect home or the ideal wardrobe. From about 1900 through 1940, hundreds of thousands of customers also selected their most important purchase, a house, from a catalog. Catalog houses were essentially do-it-yourself homebuilding kits. When a customer ordered a house through a catalog, he or she received all of the parts, usually cut to length and numbered for proper assembly, to build the selected home. In the first half of the twentieth century, catalog houses helped meet a demand for well-built, reasonably priced houses in America's expanding cities and suburbs.

Although pattern books and house plans had been widely available throughout the mid-nineteenth century, catalog housing did not begin in earnest until the early twentieth century with the founding of the Aladdin Company in 1907. One of the longest-lived...