"Wish Books" were mail order catalogs, which were dominant methods of sales in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for major retail companies such as Montgomery Ward, Spiegel, L.L. Bean, EddieBauer, and Sears & Roebuck. Almost anything (watches, clothes, equipment, appliances, automobiles and even pre-fabricated houses) could be ordered from the catalog and shipped anywhere in America, bringing big city retail to the entire country.
Mr. Haney's telling of the story mentions Tessie's role as Scarface, a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the notorious gangster Al Capone, whose nickname was Scarface.
"Ben Her," "Romeo and Joliet," and "Up the Nile" are plays on titles of literary works and/or movies: Lew Wallace's "Ben-Hur," which was made into a silent movie, i.e. Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) and into a sound picture Ben-Hur (1959); William Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," which has been made into movies in a variety of permutations, as recently as 2021 as West Side Story (2021); and John Ford's comedy Up the River (1930).
The glass photograph that Calvin projects on the wall is a product of a common photographic process for 1898. Celluloid or plastic-based film did not come into use in photography until the late 1800s and did not replace glass photographic plates until later in the early 1900s. The process with glass involved coating light-sensitive emulsion of silver salts on a glass plate that would be thinner than typical window-pane glass, making it easy to see why dropping the photograph on the floor, as Calvin does, results in the glass breaking.
As an example of inflation, the $6.75 price of a woman's dress in the mail-order catalog from 1898 would equal approximately $30 in the year 1969, when this episode originally aired. The price would equal approximately $220 in the year 2023.