Overview

In 16mo, oblong. Ff. [1] f.e., [2], 90, [4], [1] r.e.

Pocket-sized trade specification booklet, issued by one of Chicago's largest meatpacking houses to make an increasingly complex vocabulary of cuts, trims, and cures commercially exact. Armour and Company built its business in the shadow of the Union Stock Yards and by 1910 stood among the handful of firms that dominated American meatpacking. Its vast distribution system depended not simply on processing animals but on selling precisely standardized products across enormous distances. An unlikely witness to that sales culture was Dale Carnegie: before becoming famous for anything else, he sold bacon, soap, and lard for Armour across a western South Dakota territory, traveling by freight train, stagecoach, and horseback. His experience, recalled decades later in the introduction to "Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business," gives a vivid picture of the commercial world for which working trade literature like this was produced. That overseas reach is the booklet's real fascination. Its cuts are named for the markets that received them as much as for the animal they came from: Wicklow Side and Dublin Middles for Irish curers, Cumberland Middles and English Belly for England, Antwerp Backs for Belgium, and Hamburg hams cured explicitly for the German market, alongside American terms such as Boston Butts and Chicago Shoulders. Read end to end, its index becomes a small map of international commerce: Chicago pork cut, cured, and named to specifications set an ocean away. A stamp on the front endpaper, "Please return to A. de Visser," provides an appropriate trace of its working life: a small technical reference meant to be consulted, circulated, and returned.

Ref. Carnegie D., Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business, New York, 1937 (for Carnegie's experience as a traveling salesman for Armour and Company).