Silk Culture and Manufacturing Shown Progressively

Grand Rapids, MI: Belding Bros. & Co. / Seymour & Muir, 1906. Oversized pamphlet showing the steps in manufacture of silk thread & cloth, from silkworm eggs, the tending of the worm, extracting & spinning the thread, packaging for export, spinning & weaving cloth. Issued as part of a classroom kit including a cabinet (presumably of natural history and product samples) and chart. Includes photos of the four brothers (and their fine mustachios), Belding's mills & women's dorms, eggs & worms on leaves, cocoons & pupae, Japanese men & women rearing & feeding worms, reeling the cocoons, bales of raw silk; machines for winding, spinning, & twisting, stretching, reeling & dying, spooling, warping & weaving; some with men & women tending them. The Belding Brothers started selling silk thread door-to-door in Michigan in 1860, established their first factory in Connecticut in 1866, then three more by 1910 in their Michigan base, Belding, at one time known as the "Silk City of the World"; as well as in Petaluma, Montreal, & Northampton. This pamphlet is undated, but after 1906, the date their second dormitory for single women, Belrockton, was built in Belding, and before 1910, when they reaquired a fourth factory in Belding. Oversize paperback, as pictured, stapled & string-bound. Light wear, minor chips & creases to corners, pencil name on first page, damage to photo of one dorm on page [6], mostly to the sky. Text clean; [48] pages; index, brief list of Belding products, many b/w photos.. First American Edition. Paperback. Good. 9½" by 12".