This is what your brain looks like on stocks:
Christopher Dennistoun, a British antiquarian book dealer and stock trader, has a amassed what arguably could be the largest collection of printed material on the history of the stock market and financial speculation.
There are over 700 items in the collection including:
-a London jobber’s sheet published in 1698 by John Castaing “at his Office at Jonathan’s Coffee-house” that posts the prices of marketable securities all over Europe, from Hamburg to Cadiz.
– The 1898 book “The Game in Wall Street and How To Play It Successfully” which offered one of the first stock charts, showing points of accumulation and distribution.
– A copy of Daniel Defoe’s book “The Anatomy of the Exchange Alley” which contains this little nuggest “tis a compleat system of knavery; that ’tis a trade founded in fraud, born of deceit, and nourished by trick”. The first great stockmarket crash occurred in 1720, Defoe was exposing the shenanigans at least a year before that crash.
– works by Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair and Louis Auchincloss who all wrote novels on the subject.
According to the story, which appears in the Economist, there is only one known collection that rivals this offering. The Hess Collection, which was put together by a partner in the New York brokerage firm Birdsall & Hess, and has a leaning toward technical analysis. It is held at, of all places, the University of Toledo.
The collection will be offered by London booksellers Bernard Shapero. Asking price: Almost three quarters of a million dollars.
This collection is sure to outpace the market in the next 20 years. Guaranteed.
Images from University of Toledo story on the Hess Collection