This book is made up of five biographical studies ranging across the trades of nineteenth century Birmingham. As well as the lead chapter about the pen maker Joseph Gillott, there are essays on the brass founder Robert Walter Winfield, the glass manufacturer Rice Harris, the button and electroplate manufacturer James Deykin and the rule manufacturer John Rabone. The antiquarian J.A. Langford - himself once a chair maker - was much impressed by a description of what was manufactured in Birmingham in one week in the 1870s: 'A week's work in Birmingham, in its aggregate results, is something wonderful. It comprises the fabrication of 14,000,000 of pens, 6,000 bedsteads, 7,000 guns, 300,000 of cut nails, 100,000,000 of buttons, 1,000 saddles, 5,000,000 of copper and bronze coins, 20,000 pairs of spectacles, 6 tons of papier mache ware, 30,000 worth of jewellery, 4,000 miles of iron and steel wire, 10 tons of pins, 5 tons of hair pins, hooks, eyes and eyelets, 130,000 gross of wood screws, 500 tons of nuts, screw bolts, spikes and rivets, 50 tons of wrought iron hinges, 350 miles length of wax for vestas, 40 tons of refined metal, 40 tons of German silver, 1,000 dozen of fenders, 3,500 bellows, 1,000 roasting jacks, 150 sewing machines, 800 tons of brass and copper wares, besides the almost endless multitude of miscellaneous articles of which no statistics can be given, but which, like those enumerated, find employment for hundreds and thousands of busy hands, and are destined to supply the manifold wants of humanity from China to Peru.'