A Moment in Time

I recently acquired a 1965 set of the Encyclopedia Britannica that came with a set of yearbooks from 1963 (covering 1962) to 1980 (covering 1979). Beautiful volumes. The original owners seem to have kept everything that accompanied them, so the yearbooks frequently have various offers tucked into the back cover. Some of them are elaborate foldouts, promising one free volume you can keep at no obligation.

Perusing the yearbook covering 1962, I came across an insert card. The offering itself—The Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking—didn't interest me much, but the nature of the card itself did...

I think these are so charming. First, the postage back in 1962 was a mere 6¢.

Secondly, the postal address back then was "Toronto 5", which I suppose was some particular, general region of the then-City of Toronto. According to Wikipedia, the modern postal code system we use rolled out from 1972-1974. Prior to that, the big cities were divided into postal zones... "As of 1943, Toronto was divided into 14 zones, numbered from 1 to 15, except that 7 and 11 were unused, and there was a 2B zone." For what it's worth, the postal code for 151 Bloor St. W. today is M5S 1S4, and that address houses, among other things, the Consulate General of Ecuador for Toronto. Britannica is long gone.

So the cost of this two-volume set, back in the day, was apparently $6. There appeared to be 60¢ postage and handling fee, which would be waived if you sent the full $6 (rather than the two installments of $3). I wonder how you did that using a business reply card. I guess you needed to use an envelope and you were on the hook for a 6¢ stamp. The other thing that surprises me is there's no mention of tax of any kind. There was no point-of-sale federal sales tax in Canada in 1962. I don't know if Ontario had a provincial sales tax in 1962; I suspect we did, but I really couldn't say. In any case, I don't believe it did then, or does now, apply to books. But the federal GST certainly does. In any case, it's still kind of... freeing, somehow?... not to see tax mentioned in the middle of something like this. At all.

I wondered what that kind of money all of this would represent to us today. I went to the online CPI inflation calculator, and it tells me that $6.60 in 1962 would be about $59.90 today... a dime short of sixty bucks. It's strange to think of six dollars and change being the equivalent of a good meal or an afternoon in the pub today. That 6¢ would be worth 54¢ today, which I think is actually considerably less than the actual cost of a stamp these days. Well, so much for the vaunted efficiencies of technology, I guess. :)