The early business career of motion pictures lies entangled in the correspondence and documents of the firm of Raff & Gammon which have been presented to our organization through the kindness of Terry Ramsaye, Editor-in-Chief of Pathé Exchange, Inc., New York. Lost in the volumes of vituperative letters from impatient dealers and the business negotiations of Raff & Gammon for the sale of monopoly rights for whole states, the business history of the industry awaits a thorough ransacking of the available documents. What is most apparent immediately is the excitement of the public in the new invention and the rush of the more adroit to seize the profits from its immediate exploitation.

An old hand-worn brown leather book has come into the hands of the Business Historical Society on the varied business activities of a New Englander for the period 1837 t o 1857. We are indebted to Edgar A. Clarke of New Hartford, Connecticut, for this rarity.

The volumes are ponderous. The title-page in sonorous and dignified language informs one that this is “A Dictionary of the English Language in which the WORDS are deduced from their ORIGINALS, and illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers, to which are prefixed, a history of the language, and an English grammar. By Samuel Johnson, A.M. In Two Volumes.” The page is then topped off in good Johnsonian style with a nine-line Latin quotation from Horace.

A Northern man's impression of Richmond and Petersburg, only two months after the surrender of Lee, is preserved in a letter to Frances Stabler, daughter of James P. Stabler, who was Superintendent of Construction on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1831 and '32. The friend who is writing begins with a eulogy on Lincoln, whose assassination is the news of the hour, and then continues with an account of a trip to Richmond which he had just made with his father and someone he refers to as “Brother Eddy,” whether in the literal or the Quaker sense is not clear.

A very valuable collection of business papers of the Barberini and Sciarra-Colonna families of Rome was acquired by the Society last year through the generosity of Mr. Edward J. Frost of Boston. Among the documents is a huge ledger relating to the administration of Monte Libretto, a village in the Sabine Hills, which the Barberini owned for more than a century. A photograph of this volume appeared in an earlier Bulletin. The entries in the ledger are for the closing years of the eighteenth century.

This month is in a sense an anniversary season for The Business Historical Society, for although it was founded in October, 1925, it was not until the following June that it became an active organization. The field which the Society entered four years ago was almost unknown, and since that time its work in collecting and organizing material, and in enlisting the interest of the community has already given business history a definite place among subjects for scholarly study and research.

Several years ago the Business Historical Society received as a gift a copy of the oldest printed treatise on accountancy written by the Franciscan friar, Lucas Pacioli, and published in Venice in 1494. The system of bookkeeping by double entry which Pacioli described very clearly and accurately, was already in use in northern Italy more than a century and a half before the friar composed his famous treatise.

“Manila lies between the richest countries in the East and West Indies. One can find here the silver of Peru and New Spain, diamonds from Golconda, topaz, sapphires and cinnamon from Ceylon, pepper from Java, cloves and nutmeg from Molucca, rubies and camphor from Borneo, pearls and costly carpets from Persia, benzoin, rubber and ivories from Camboja, musk from Lequios, silks and cotton goods from Bengal, porcelain and fabrics and other luxuries from China.” So runs an eighteenth-century description of the wealth carried by the yearly treasure ship which sailed between Acapulco, in Mexico, and Manila.

It has proved to be a difficult task to decipher the Medici records, particularly the account books. Three articles of agreement, various letters, and the oldest account book have been transcribed and translated. These materials throw not a little light on the trade of Florence with the Levant. It is expected that the work already begun by Dr. Gertrude Richards will be finished during the coming academic year.

“Imagine a Yankee Rip van Winkle,” says Samuel Eliot Morison in his Maritime History of Massachusetts, “who had slept out his twenty years within hailing distance of the State House dome. As he looked about him in 1853 the most astonishing sight would be —, not the railroad, not the telegraph, not the steamship — but the clipper ship. During the last half of his sleep there had taken place the greatest revolution in naval architecture since the days of Hawkins and Drake. Below in Boston Harbor, and setting sail for a port whose name he had never heard, were vessels four and five times as large as any he had ever seen, with canvas five and six times the utmost area that the old Boston East-Indiamen dared spread to the lightest air.”

A Scientific American of 1882 contains an article, with several illustrations, describing the gravity coal piers of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, at Hoboken, New Jersey. The enormous traffic in coal carried on at this port, says this author, requires broad, cheap and rapid methods of handling large quantities at once.

Some correspondence, which has come to the Society, of the Mayor of Boston in April, 1851, in regard to the threat of a “tumult, riot, and mob” over a fugitive slave case, recalls the time when slavery was not only a very live issue, but one which split the North into two bitterly hostile camps. For years Boston abolitionists carried on their campaign in the midst of a community hardly more sympathetic with their views than the South itself.