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.

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 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.

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.