German business firms, especially banking firms, have frequently undertaken the preparation of memorial volumes devoted to the development of their particular enterprise.

A recent purchase of the George F. Baker Library, whose acquisitions are at the disposal of the Society, is entitled A PRESENT For an APPRENTICE: Or, A Sure GUIDE to gain both Esteem and Estate. With Rules for his Conduct to his MASTER, and in the WORLD. Ours is a tenth edition and was printed for James Fletcher, in St. Paul's Church-Yard, and Benjamin Collins, Bookseller, on the New Canal in Salisbury. The work bears no date and is ostensibly written “By a late Lord Mayor of London,” and dedicated by the editor to Sir John Barnard. However, Halkett & Laing, on the authority of the British Museum Catalogue, attribute the authorship to the said Sir John Barnard and place the date of the work as of about 1740.

The following interview with Professor Matthew B. Hammond of the Department of Economics of Ohio State University may indicate how collections of old business manuscripts are used and what may be their value. Professor Hammond has made the history of the cotton textile industry his particular study for much of a lifetime, with the result that he has become an authority on the subject. Throughout all of his study he has found manuscript material one of his best sources of information.

The Business Historical Society has received another splendid addition to its ever growing collection of foreign business manuscripts. This is an eighteenth-century Spanish account book which was found in the city of Havana during the Spanish-American War and brought to this country by an American soldier. This old book, beautiful to look upon with its handsome writing in iron-gall ink on heavy vellum paper, and valuable for the information it contains, is the gift of Colonel John R. Fordyce, a member of the Business Historical Society.

The biographical information in the following article has been taken from a sketch of his father's life written by Mr. Harrison Dibblee at the request of the Business Historical Society.

Albert Dibblee, commission merchant of San Francisco from 1849 to 1895, came of a family that had been among the earliest settlers in America. He was directly descended from Robert Dibblee who settled in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1630.

The George F. Baker Library has recently purchased a rare eighteenth-century volume, entitled A Familiar Discourse or DIALOGUE Concerning the Mine-Adventure, which was printed by F. Collins in the Old-Bailey, London, 1700. Though no author's name appears in our volume, Halkett & Laing's Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature, on the authority of the Advocate's Library, Edinburgh, attributes the work to one William Shiers who was a shareholder in the venture.

In these turbulent times when economists and business men alike find it difficult to solve the business depression which has descended on our complex civilization, it is refreshing to turn to the early economic tracts which were published in this country, and to contemplate the relatively simple panaceas which were advanced by their authors for a correction of the evils of the time. Again, it a consolation to turn the pages of history and realize that we are not suffering from any unique “disease.” In fact in 1820 the outlook was quite as dark as it is today. The productive industry of from sixty to eighty thousand people was destroyed. The cotton planters had suffered a loss of approximately eight million dollars in profits, and the merchants, eleven and a half million dollars, by the fall in cotton prices. Flour was selling at such a low figure that the farmers had but a meagre return for their efforts. The fall in tobacco prices “spread distress and desolation in the state of Virginia,” and South Carolina had lost her chief export market, that for indigo, which product had constituted about a third of her exports.

Dr. O. T. Howe has given a Record Book and copies of letters of his esteemed ancestor Captain Octavius Howe to the Business Historical Society. These letters were used by Dr. Howe in his book Argonauts of '49 — History and Adventures of the Emigrant Companies from Massachusetts 1849-1850 (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1923), and also in the unpublished biography he has prepared of Captain Howe. The letters in question deal with Captain Howe's exploits in taking the brig Tigress and her cargo around the Horn to San Francisco, and his attempts to dispose of her cargo, in the early fifties.

Material on the methods of the dry goods business prior to the Civil War is almost as scarce as the proverbial “hen's teeth.” It was undoubtedly carried on in all parts of the country and undoubtedly, also, the manner of conducting it changed from time to time, yet the methods of operation and the changes therein have left surprisingly little trace. Something of this history may be secured from the chance remarks of the commercial newspapers of the period, and probably much may be acquired (the work being almost wholly yet to be done) from the account books and letter books of country stores and other mercantile establishments of those days.

Those who have been in any way interested in the Essex Institute, or have used their already valuable collections of shipping papers, will welcome the addition of this important institution to the group of libraries and similar collecting agencies that are endeavoring to accumulate and preserve the materials for business history.

I most heartily Congratulate You on the Completion of the Middlesex Canal, the Judgment and Perseverence with which that Stupenduous work hath been Conducted will deservedly render the Name of Baldwin as Immortal as the Middlesex Canal it Self.

Thus read a letter written to Colonel Loammi Baldwin, the able engineer, by his friend and former partner, Josiah Pierce, on December 25, 1802. But today that monument is but a dry ditch and “the canal in any complete form remains principally as a faint memory in the minds of some few members of the oldest living generation.” However, another monument, which none of the available biographical accounts has mentioned, remains to remind later generations of the feats of this pioneer engineer and Revolutionary hero — the town which bears his name — Baldwin, in Cumberland County, Maine.

Last month the century-old title controversy was revived when Mrs. Pinchot, wife of the Governor of Pennsylvania, in a radio talk, made the assertion that she had always objected to the use of the expression “First Lady”; declaring that “it is a foolish, high-hat kind of a label, whether it is the first lady of a city, a state, or of the whole country — and is not especially appropriate in America.”

Ambrose Heal published in 1925 a book entitled London Tradesmen's Cards of the Eighteenth Century, and in the preface to this very fine volume he made the comment that “it is perhaps remarkable that no book has hitherto been published dealing with tradesmen's cards. … Not only has no book ever been published on the subject, but references in archaeological journals and collectors' magazines are of the scantiest nature and hard to track.” What Mr. Heal said six years ago is equally true today of American material, with one important exception. In 1927 a volume entitled Early American Trade Cards, from the collection of Bella C. Landauer, with critical notes by Adele Jenny, was published in New York. In this volume there are forty-four illustrations, taking us into the history of American trade cards from about 1730 to 1877. Recently Mrs. Bella C. Landauer made a generous gift to the George F. Baker Library of several hundred trade cards of the latter part of the nineteenth century. These cards supplemented two previous gifts, for there were some trade cards in the Trotter Collection, and Mr. Charles H. Taylor has given a number of such cards to the Business Historical Society.

During the past month both Mr. Howard Corning, Curator of the Manuscript Department of the George F. Baker Library, and Mr. Frank C. Ayres, Secretary of the Business Historical Society, spoke over stations WBZ, WBZA and WIXAZ. This broadcast was arranged through the courtesy of Mr. E. J. Rowell, Coöperative Representative of the New England Radio Market News Service.