One of the best kitchen bookshelf resources you can own, while out-of-print, is fairly available on the secondary market. I don't know how I became aware of it, but I am glad to have found it.
The book is Cutting Up In The Kitchen
by Merle Ellis. Originally published in 1975, this is one of the most detailed and comprehensive guides to meat that you could hope to find. Ellis was a producer at NBC who went on to become a butcher. I remember that my grandmother, my culinary hero, was a big Merle Ellis fan.
This book has all the details that I didn't get out of the texts I used in culinary school when I took Butchery and Fishmongering. We used a combination of Wayne Gislen's Professional Cooking
, NAMP Meat Buyers Guide
, and internally-developed lecture notes. Nothing wrong with any of them, but Ellis really fills in the gaps. If only for his comprehensive lists of the aliases and names that meats go by, it is a great reference. Do you know what a Chicago Round is? Ellis will fill you in.
As I mentioned, the book is way, way out-of-print. But here is the really cool thing: you can buy it used on Amazon for less than the shipping will cost. I bought mine last year for $0.11. Seriously. Eleven cents, plus $3.49 in shipping. I checked while writing this entry and there are numerous copies available for less than $1 USD. Cookbooks and kitchen references can be insanely expensive, so it is well worth snatching a copy.