Daniel Defoe, in his “Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain,” says of the town of Maiden in 1761,

“Here is a good public Library for the Use of the Minister and the Clergy of the Hundreds adjoining to the sea; and any Gentleman may borrow a Book, upon depositing the Value of it.”

It would give him a great deal of satisfaction and some surprise if he could see the Baker Library, where thousands of books of commercial interest may be consulted freely by every citizen of Boston. One might suspect that it would give him even greater satisfaction and surprise him less to see his own commercial pamphlets in a place of honor in the Librarian's Room. Perhaps the most versatile of English writers, he apparently had economic matters nearest his heart; for as he traveled through England, though he noted everything of interest in a given place, he dwelt lovingly and lingeringly on its commerce or fishing, manufactures or farming, the rent of its land, and the reasons for its poverty or prosperity.

The members and friends of The Business Historical Society will be happy to learn of the constructive program that has been adopted for the coming year. The Society, in conjunction with the Harvard Business School, has undertaken to publish the first periodical devoted to the history both of economics and of business, for the benefit of the members. This journal will be a pioneer in its field. Any number of publications deal with economic research, but these are exclusively modern in their interest.

If one were to calculate the value of the brown sugar alone that is consumed annually in East Boston, it would come to many times $3500.

The Library has recently acquired a fairly complete set, from volume 5 on, of the London Economist. There is probably only one that is complete in the United States, and the Harvard Business Library is very fortunate in having a set that compares favorably with any of the others to be found in this country.

On Tuesday, October 4, the Harvard Business School entertained as its guest Mr. H. Gordon Selfridge, the first man to introduce American department store methods into England. Mr. Selfridge has just deposited with the Business School Library a part of his collection of the original account books of a branch of the Medici family, covering the period from 1377 to 1597. He is a member of The Business Historical Society, and long before its foundation he was carrying on the sort of research that is the principal object of this organization. His interest is in the biographies of famous business men of the past, the Fuggers and the Medici in particular.

There has recently come into the possession of the Society a valuable collection of books and pamphlets — some 200 items in all — that has been gathered together, and presented to the Society by Mr. Joseph P. Day, the well-known New York real-estate man.

The value of old tax data, as Professor Burbank has stated, lies in the wealth of detail in the tax lists, and more especially in the valuation lists. For each tax-payer these latter lists frequently give the amount and value of real estate, annual crops, live stock, stock in trade, shipping, mills of various sorts, warehouses, and occasionally even the silver plate owned by the family. Many of these headings, too, are in detailed form. For instance, real estate is divided into plow land, pasturage, orcharding, meadows, and wood land.

The names of Chippendale, Hepplewhite, and Sheraton are as familiar to the lovers of old furniture as those of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson are to students of English literature. The names of all these men have stood the test of years because of the real worth of their productions and of their influence on the future of their art. The former three, however, might have become a mere tradition if, like many of their contemporary fellow-craftsmen, they had failed to leave any written record of their work.

A source of information concerning the early economic conditions in this country, and a source which has heretofore been little employed, is the tax records of local communities. I have run across some of them in an historical study of taxation in Massachusetts in which I have tried to press back the story to as early a period as possible. Undoubtedly, somewhat similar records are available in other states, and altogether they would supply many data upon the economic life in this country during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for which other sources of realistic material are all too scanty.

The Baker Library has recently come into possession of a bit of history which should be intensely interesting to a country in which iron and steel play so large a part. Fifty-five documents have been unearthed, dated between 1650 and 1685, and relating to the Iron Works at Lynn, Massachusetts, the first in the country. Some are originals, and others are certified as true copies.

In the museum of the Wedgwood firm at Etruria, Stoke-on-Trent, is a collection of more than a million manuscripts, the business papers of Josiah Wedgwood, founder of the firm (b. 1730, d. 1795). Invoices, ledgers, oven books, letters to his customers and his bankers, memoranda on the organization of his business and of the industry as a whole — there is a mass of material, incomplete and only gradually being got into order by the devoted labours of the Curator, Mr. Cook. Unfortunately no effort had been made at the time to preserve these records, which were therefore destroyed or dispersed.

The moving pictures, however much critics and doctors of divinity may lament their prevalence, as corrupters of the public taste or morals, are come upon us as an established fact. The Harvard Business School recognized the state of affairs by arranging a course of lectures for the students, given by some of the most prominent men in the industry; and our Secretary has recently come upon some timely information about its origin, through Mr. A. C. Rulofson, of San Francisco, one of our members.

A fifteenth century quittance, the oldest business document so far acquired by the Society, has come recently from Professor David Eugene Smith of Columbia University. Professor Smith is himself an enthusiastic collector, particularly in the line of the history of mathematics, and early Arabian literature on astronomy and mathematics.