Get your Great Depression cultural products

According to Brandweek:

“There’s a financial cry in the country right now — and that’s going to translate into shopping,” says Karen Bard, the resident pop-culture expert for online auction site eBay. Bard’s not talking about how much people are spending so much as what they’re buying. Sales of just about anything related to the Great Depression have been surging since Christmas. In the last three months, eBay’s category “Depression Era” has seen a 15 percent increase in sales traffic, with specific spikes recorded for 1930s music (up 8 percent) and cloche hats (up 65 percent). At Amazon, December 2008 sales of Depression-related titles (including The Great Crash, The Forgotten Man and Ben Bernanke’s Essays on the Great Depression) were up by a whopping 750 percent (the company does not disclose unit sales).

Depression momentum started building just before the holiday shopping rush-which was, not coincidentally, the same time that bad news about the economy began to feel merely like harbingers of far worse. Between September and October, Netflix recorded a 10 percent rise in rentals of The Grapes of Wrath.