North American Windmill Manufacturers' Trade Literature: A Descriptive Guide

This bibliography of historic trade literature on farm and ranch windmills is the first of its kind for any large class of objects mass-produced in North America. It includes catalogs, price and part lists, handbills, folders, posters, and advertising cards held in public collections throughout the United States and abroad. The materials, which date from the 1840s through the 1990s, will be almost impossible to locate without this guide since they do not appear in the Library of Congress on-line catalog.

The manufacturers' names are arranged alphabetically in the body of the book. Trade literature for each company or distributor is then arranged chronologically, described, summarized, and assigned location codes. To find information on a specific windmill, one need only look for the model in the index. Windmill enthusiasts, museum curators, scholars of manufacturing and advertising, and collectors of ephemera will relish this result of more than twenty years of windmill research.