{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","uuid":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","normalized_title":"timeconsumptionandeverydaylifepracticematerialityandculture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":236,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%2C%20Consumption%20and%20Everyday%20Life%20Practice%2C%20Materiality%20and%20Culture","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/search"},"page":{"printed_page":124,"pdf_page":125,"physical_index":125,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"4a1f07fc1af9c0f995810ff2422693eec4794b5bc73bac3fbc7e162a8f5fdc49"},"chapter":"List of Tables and Figures","content":"The seed trade took the seeds from their growing fields and added value to them by sorting, categorizing, storing, describing, packaging, mailing and offering advice through printed ephemera. This ‘manufacturing’ made seeds sold by firms more convenient, and perhaps even more valuable, than those saved by consumers from the previous year’s plants. With these processes, natural produce was transformed into commercial products, and those products became associated with the firm that sold the commodity, even if that firm did not originally ‘produce’ or grow the seeds. We might consider these organizational processes the industrial influence of the seed trade, where industry implies a systematized and efficient approach to labour, usually towards an end product with a market value of some sort. The routines of these commercial forms of horticultural labour were linked to the routines of seasonal consumer activity. Unlike some commodities, which could be purchased and used at any time, seeds for the American market were generally purchased and planted in a narrow band of time in the late winter and early spring. The consumers horticultural calendar determined the sequencing not only of the sourcing of seeds within the trade, but also such tasks as writing and printing the annual catalogue or working in the mailroom to open orders.\n\nThe purpose-built structures in which this processing and publicizing took place constituted the factories of seed ‘production’, along with the fields in which they were grown. In fact, many nineteenth-century seed companies promoted these sites of industry in their own ephemera. Promotional materials of the latter half of the nineteenth century frequently included engravings of these grand warehouse buildings. Trade catalogues might include several pages devoted to the different sectors of the interior workspaces, both graphically and verbally depicting the work that occurred within them – ranging from opening mail, sorting seeds, designing and printing marketing materials, packaging and mailing – as busy hives of work. The emphasis on these spaces of sorting, storing and sending, which mediated between the producers’ and consumers’ fields, showed the processes of distribution to be as significant to the development of the seed trade as those of growing. In 1867, the American Agriculturalist commended B.K. Bliss as a leader in the seed trade by writing, ‘By liberal advertising, thorough system, and indefatigable attention to the details of his work, he has built up a business extending all over the United States, and demanding larger facilities’ (Spring Catalogue 1868). The facilities in question, however, were not at the firm’s growing fields in Springfield, Massachusetts, but rather their new warehouse building in New York City, through which all orders were handled. If the word ‘industrial’ suggests a highly organized or systematized form of work, it also connotes ‘scale and scope’ (to borrow from the business historian Alfred Chandler), in both production and potential markets. The urban warehouses of the seed trade symbolized in built form the breadth of the trade.\n\n124\n\n• Marina Moskowitz","previous_page":123,"next_page":125}