?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 600 - $ 900
(OIL.) Sales manual for Standard Oil Indiana. 93 mimeograph pages, plus 18 printed pamphlets laid down on unnumbered leaves or bound in. 4to, 11 x 8 1/2 inches, original 1/2 cloth post binder, worn and lacking one of the two binding brads; minor wear and dampstaining to contents, a bit of worming at bottom edge. No place, circa 1927
A crudely produced training manual for salesmen at Standard Oil Indiana filling stations. It starts by explaining the basic concept in two panels: "Stop! Look! Read! You can make more money." It explains why Standard Oil products are best, where their production facilities are, the number of experienced oilmen on the company's board, famous Standard Oil innovations, and the commissions offered to salesmen on bulk sales. A battery of sales pitches, typical objections, and responses is offered in dialogue form. Many transcribed testimonial letters are provided, most of them dated 1927.
Farmers seem to be the primary audience, but a variety of petroleum-based products are on offer, including Semdac Liquid Gloss furniture polish. Laid in are more professionally printed pamphlets such as "What is Good Gasoline?", "You'll Like Ethyl," "Neolite Burning Oil Hatches More Chicks," "Why Wash the Outside and Neglect the Inside?", and "Keep Your Hogs Free from Lice with Mica Axle Grease." The 23 March 1927 issue of National Petroleum News is bound in.
A cover sheet required a training agent and the salesman to log in with the hours spent reviewing the book, and which pages were reviewed. This copy was used for two 90-minute sessions by trainer Alf Anderson and salesman F.H. Thompson of Viroqua, WI. They only got through page 28.
Standard Oil was founded by the Rockefellers in 1870. When it was determined to be a monopoly in 1911, it was forced to break up into 43 different companies. Standard Oil Indiana had the rights to operate gas stations under the Standard name through much of the Midwest. It absorbed the American Oil Company in 1925 and became Amoco in 1985.
This volume is fascinating as early automotive and industrial history, but is also an eerie 1920s precursor to the modern world of scripted telemarketers and PowerPoint presentations.
