The January piece is a set of eight manuals from the late 1930s and early 1970s, almost all written by the British subsidiary of the United Shoe Machinery Company (Massachusetts, 1899) on components and operation of their machines. The set belonged to the former mechanic Antonio Mateu Coll (1942-1999), known as “Toni de la United”, and has been donated to the Museum by his son Père Mateu Torres. Machine repair is an often overlooked task within the auxiliary footwear industries. Although it is not in any phase of the manufacture of footwear, without the maintenance and repair of the machines would not have been able to manufacture shoes. In fact, having according to which machines broken down in a factory meant a great slowdown or even a cut in the production chain, so that whenever you could try to hold on with the machine half running and repaired in the hours of rest. This task required a lot of specialists with a lot of technical and mechanical knowledge, who learned mainly through the practice and consultation of these catalogues, since there were no studies of mechanics in Mallorca. This set of manuals or catalogues, although very similar, have different titles: “List of parts and instructions”, “Parts catalogue” or “Catalogue of Replacement Parts” of spare parts). On the cover, in addition to the title, the name of the machine to which it refers (in some cases also translated into Spanish with a sticker), the year and month in which it was published and the name of the company and its postal address. On the first page is the image of the machine and then the drawings of its parts with the numbered references of each. The mechanics consulted these manuals when they had a doubt about the operation of the machine or about any of its components, which had to be ordered directly in England, as neither the parts nor the tools to repair were universal. Since there are references to the manufacture of footwear, the repair of machinery has always been a task linked to the male sex. Large factories used to have their own mechanics, although they also sometimes had to request the services of mechanics from companies that manufactured and / or sold the machinery, such as the USMC international itself or local Adobats Fluxá (1963-2000).