The organized collection of business records at the University of Illinois was begun in November, 1936, when Dean C. M. Thompson and a colleague approached several business houses in the southern part of the State.

During the years after the Napoleonic Wars London merchant bankers, including Baring Brothers and Company, faced new complexities in the management of their business. Among the new problems was to find a satisfactory means of selecting trustworthy correspondents. London had become the leading money center of the world. With that development came a great extension of business for all leading banking and mercantile houses. Old correspondents in all parts of the world increased their operations with “The City” and many new names were added to the lists of correspondents on the books of the Londoners. The relative standing of all these changed from month to month and year to year. Thus, the increasing numbers and the rapidly changing status of the correspondents afforded plentiful evidence that the former haphazard collection of information and the strictly personal knowledge were inadequate for the demands of safety and prudence.

In January the members of the Business Historical Society will receive the Casebook in American Business History, written by N. S. B. Gras and Henrietta M. Larson and published by F. S. Crofts & Company, of New York. This book is presented to the members of the Society by a generous friend of business education.

During the present year has occurred an anniversary of special interest in the history of American business and to the student of business history.

A recent phenomenon in business is the large corporation. The capitalization of the Northern Pacific at $100,000,000 was considered unwise and even fantastic in the 1860's.

Many readers of the Bulletin may be interested in Paul H. Giddens' The Birth of the Oil Industry. The story is concerned chiefly with the events which led to the establishment of the petroleum industry and with its first years as a successful industry, and it traces the rise, prosperity, and decline of one of the most extreme speculative booms the country has ever seen. Large fortunes were made — and lost — in a short time. But the important fact about the book is that it shows how a new industry was built and records the factors which went into its making.

Sometime in the eighteenth century, Marie, sister of Jacobus Perier of Batavia, East Indies, married Pierre Dutilh, son of Abel. In the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library are 12,000 to 15,000 items of Dutilh business correspondence, written in French, Spanish, Hollandish, German, and English during the years 1755-1874, the bulk being from 1755-1803. These are arranged chronologically, but have not been indexed.

Written from the outside with access to inside information and records, Professor Hower's History of an Advertising Agency: N. W. Ayer & Son at Work avoids the over-praise of a memorial volume written solely from within an organization, and at the same time has more reality than the cold clinical history of an individual or institution written solely from public records.

An interesting account of a business career has recently come into the possession of Baker Library. The Autobiography of Caspar Thomas Hopkins, a California pioneer, has been obtained by copying the original in the possession of one of his daughters, Mrs. Frank Hinckley. This story of his life was written in 1889, not for the public but for the edification of his daughters. It has therefore the special value of being a very frank record of his experiences and his achievements. The whole book is most interesting but here we are considering only his work in insurance. His youth will be touched on to give an idea of his early training.

The month of May, just passed, marked the hundredth anniversary of the oldest chartered bank in the State of Wisconsin. The Marine National Exchange Bank of Milwaukee is the result of the merging in 1930 of two pioneer institutions, the National Exchange Bank which was first chartered by Wisconsin in 1855 and the Marine National Bank, chartered under the National Banking Act in 1900, under the free banking act of Wisconsin in 1853, and originally chartered by the legislature of Wisconsin Territory as the Wisconsin Marine and Fire Insurance Co. in 1839.

During the month of June the Society will send to its members Business and Capitalism by Professor N. S. B. Gras.

Ours is not the only period in which business men have had annoying restrictions placed upon their activities by outside agencies. In the Middle Ages business was almost completely controlled by regulations imposed by the gilds, by political rulers, and by the Church. The gilds restricted the number of persons permitted to enter given occupations, sometimes established prices which would be fair primarily to the consumer and would allow only a small profit to the producer, and attempted to exercise control over the volume of production.

Interest in the safeguarding of the records of business houses in Great Britain began to be manifested about a generation ago, when it was realized that an intelligent use of the books of textile mill-owners enabled the historian to give a more convincing account of the industrial revolution in the North than had hitherto been available.

In this day, when insecure living and working conditions have come to be recognized as a great problem in social security, it is interesting to see how one industrial firm attacked that problem almost a century ago. The firm was the Waltham Watch Co., and the executive responsible for its labor management was Aaron Dennison. The watch company was one of three large manufacturing enterprises started by Dennison. The others were the Dennison Manufacturing Co., of Framingham, Massachusetts, and the Dennison Watch Case Co., of Birmingham, England.