A nice collection of agricultural advertising notebooks, and some reminiscences on how they were used:
These pads and pencils were basic record keeping tools for a generation of farmers. One book might contain all of a farmer’s purchases and sales for a year. It might hold entries on all of the cash advanced or credit guaranteed to a tenant farmer. It might be used as a tally book when weighing cotton picked by several people. Some farmers kept records of breedings and birthings of cows and hogs, maybe even survival rates of the young and comments about how good a mother the dam was. Anything that a farmer needed to record could be preserved in one or more of these booklets served by their companion pencils.
These pads and pencils were basic record keeping tools for a generation of farmers. One book might contain all of a farmer’s purchases and sales for a year. It might hold entries on all of the cash advanced or credit guaranteed to a tenant farmer. It might be used as a tally book when weighing cotton picked by several people. Some farmers kept records of breedings and birthings of cows and hogs, maybe even survival rates of the young and comments about how good a mother the dam was. Anything that a farmer needed to record could be preserved in one or more of these booklets served by their companion pencils.