Furs and the Fur Trade (abridged)

John C. Sachs

Captain John C. Sachs, ‘late of the Northamptonshire Regiment’ and author of Silver Fox Farming and other works, published Furs and the Fur Trade in 1923 as part of Pitman’s ‘Common Commodities’ series. Written in a slightly archaic style and based on an unquestioning assumption that killing animals and then wearing them was a good thing, it nevertheless includes much valuable information, as these extracts may show.

It begins with an overview of the history of wearing fur:

The practice of wearing furs is as old as humanity, and the modern woman, who snugly nestles in her fur coat be it of priceless sable or the more homely rabbit cannot reproach herself, even did she wish to, with being other than a true daughter of Eve. Our earliest recorded ancestors, Adam and Eve, wore furs (Gen. iii, 21), and although the mere male does not, even in these post-profiteering days, affect them now to any extent, at least in temperate climes, no modern woman, on the other hand, considers herself ‘dressed’ until upon the finished products of the dressmaker’s art she has superimposed her ‘furs’.

Furs have a tremendous fascination for womankind: Arriet of Mile End and Hildegarde of Park Lane each assumes her ‘furs’ when she wishes to impress, not merely when she is desirous of keeping warm; and Kipling never wrote a truer couplet than when he said:

The colonel’s lady
And Judy O’Grady
Are sisters under the skin.