A collection of manuscripts, replete with details which rebuild the picture of foreign commerce in the 1840s and 1850s, has recently been given to The Business Historical Society by Mr. Gordon Dexter, whose father, an officer in most of the companies whose papers make up the collection, preserved the records which have so fully come down to us. It is chiefly composed of the cheques, bills, accounts, contracts and correspondence of William Appleton and Company, and the successor of that firm, Samuel Hooper and Company, merchant shipowners of the type described in the previous article.

An old ledger, which has come to the Society, belonging to the proprietor of the Boston Exchange Coffee House, recalls the part once played by taverns in social and commercial life.

“The Industrial and Commercial Correspondence of Alexander Hamilton,” the first book published under the auspices of The Business Historical Society, incorporated, was sent to each member of the Society toward the last of February.

Probably few members of the present generation, who shudder at the inhumanity of the old laws allowing imprisonment for debt, realize that it is still allowable under the laws of certain states. In New York and Pennsylvania, for example, a man may be imprisoned for debt incurred by neglect or misconduct in any professional employment. In Nevada, he may lose his liberty for nonpayment of damages arising out of cases of fraud, libel and slander. And in Massachusetts, he may be sent to prison even for ordinary breach of contract if he owes as much as twenty dollars, exclusive of costs, and if his creditor can prove any one of six charges, among them, “that since the debt was contracted the debtor has hazarded or paid money or other property to the value of $100 or more in some kind of gaming prohibited by the law of the State.”

The Byron Weston Company, paper manufacturers of Dalton, Massachusetts, have been using the historical route to publicity through a contest for the purpose of unearthing old American documents. The prize stories were collected into a book entitled “Dead Men Tell Unusual Tales,” and The Business Historical Society has been presented with a copy.

Building was an event in seventeenth-century America. In 1637, a “schoale, or colledge,” for which the Massachusetts General Court had voted four hundred pounds the previous year, was “ordered to be at New Towne.” The next year, the name of New Towne was changed to Cambridge, and the “colledge was ordered to be called Harvard College.” Thirty-four years later, the first building was falling into disrepair. The towns of the colony were called upon to make an appropriation for a new one, “of brick and stone,” and the agency for building it was given to Deacon John Cooper and one William Manning.

The papers of “Israel Thorndike, Esq.” are the first manuscript collection arranged and mounted by Baker Library. They are fragmentary first hand tales of shipwrecks; of the capture and imprisonment of sailors and sea captains; of trading meat, metals and upland cotton for silks and spices (these were the early days of the American pepper trade), by bright, vivid young captains and supercargoes who were virtually agents of a wealthy house, and whose reports of the market and conditions in foreign seaport towns were a valuable portion of America's knowledge of foreign economic and political affairs.

The founding of a society in Norton, Massachusetts, in 1797, for the detecting of horse thieves bears witness that the crime wave is a perennial phenomenon.

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.