The recent accession of the Hancock papers to The Business Historical Society collection recalls a now forgotten type of merchant once prevailing in Europe and America. He was sometimes called the merchant prince; certainly he represents the highest class of business man from at least the thirteenth to the early nineteenth century. Sometimes he operated alone; sometimes with his brothers or cousins in the form of a family partnership.

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.

On April 10, 1928, the first complete periodical ever sent over the telephone wires was issued by a Cambridge firm.