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The old book"The Call of The Hen"by Walter Hogan is a tad grisly, but a good one to start with to learn how to select for egg production. I think of Mr. Hogan as a kind of mad scientist; back in 1913, he was spending as much as $10.00 a bird buying the top laying hens just to kill them so he could study their skeletal structure to prove his hypothesis. 
Another great old book is "Judging Poultry for Production" by Rice, Hall, & Marble. It was a line in that book about how birds showing the broody tendency have as high or even higher winter production records than birds that don't that got me thinking. I noticed with the Anconas almost twenty years ago, that the eggs I incubated in January would hatch pullets that would in turn lay through the winter. Anconas don't go broody, at least, I've never had one that was reliable with a clutch, but they are still breeding, so the eggs are fertile.   Anyway, I've been selecting for early/late eggs in all my other birds ever since.