“Did we ever run a prize letter contest ?”

“I think we did, when O'Riley was here.”

“Any good?”

“That's too far back for me.”

So runs the pattern for a conversation that any advertising man has heard. No one in the company now knows whether that contest was a success or a terrible flop, because O'Riley is gone and the company hasn't any memory.

Here is a much needed authoritative biography of one of America's greatest industrial capitalists—at least the peer of Vanderbilt, Hill, Carnegie, and Ford. Its two ample volumes provide us with facts old and new, corrections of previous judgments, and the author's own inimitable way of putting things.

For the past eleven years we have witnessed real estate values receding in Boston as well as in all the other older cities. This span of time, although short in the history of a city, represents a fairly large portion of the life of a real estate owner. The buying and selling of real estate since 1936 has been quite as extensive as in the normal years previous to the first World War. Real estate prices, however, in some of the older business and residential sections of the city of Boston have returned to levels below those of the pre-Civil War years.

The history of business education is still to be written. It would make an interesting story, one that would deal not only with training for business but also with the condition and the problems of business through the centuries. Especially revealing would be the development of ideas and institutions concerned with training for administration. The importance of such training was recognized early; in the fourth century B. C., Xenophon in his Oeconomicus wrote about training for management, and a father in thirteenth-century Norway, as recorded in The King's Mirror, advised his son what he should learn in preparation for a career as a merchant.

Business history presents so many problems and opportunities that I hardly know which ones to discuss in the time available or where to start. Perhaps it is well to begin by reminding ourselves just what business history is, for there is a great deal of misunderstanding on this point. I refuse to attempt a precise definition because it seems to be impossible to obtain a satisfactory definition of the term “business” itself, but I think that I can give a fairly clear idea of the scope of the field.

A familiar figure in ancient Greek and Latin literature is the traveling merchant. Sometimes we find him in his work, usually having some adventure, even exploring new lands. Plautus, who lived in 254-184 B. C. and used Greek themes and contemporary figures in his comedies, made such a merchant the hero of his play, Mercator. The play deals with a young Athenian traveling merchant by the name of Charinus.

“Pieces of eight, pieces of eight!” screamed Captain Flint's parrot in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Yet, how many of us, who as youngsters dreamed over that tale of adventure, realized that the bird spoke the correct name for what our American and English forefathers called the Spanish dollar?

The striking problem faced by the labor administrator in the early Connecticut button industry was the shortage of native skilled artisans. While unskilled laborers, bookkeepers, and even managers could be drawn from sources in this country, highly skilled artisans were usually available only in England. The shortage of skilled labor thus truly constituted the bottleneck to quality production. In the correspondence of Alexander Hamilton, for the year 1791, there is a letter from one John Mix, pewter buttonmaker of New Haven, reporting that he was going to produce diverse kinds of buttons. This was possible “because we have a person lately from Europe who has the skill perfectly who is a gentleman who is able and has engaged to instruct and teach us everything necessary in the making of them.”

The Business Historical Society has just published a revised edition of the pamphlet, The Preservation of Business Records, by Ralph M. Hower, assistant professor of Business History at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and clerk of the Business Historical Society.

The General Foods Corporation has recently issued a brochure entitled A Calendar of Walter Baker & Company, Inc., and its Times, 1765-1940. As the name implies, the Calendar consists of quotations from contemporary sources and statements of facts arranged by years and sometimes under specific dates.