ART OF MONEY GETTING or, Golden Rules for Making Money by P. T. Barnum (1880)

[JamesR]

https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/bar ... eygetting/

P.S. I almost stuck this in the inspiration forum. That tells me the Resources/Reading forum & Inspiration forum could be merged.

[Dragline]

That's a great find. I am very fond of reading self-help or "how to" material from the 19th Century or earlier and seeing what lessons are still taught today, because it helps you separate the wheat from the chaff as far as what is timeless advice and what is just current fashion.

Slightly OT, there was a recent podcast about P.T. Barnum and freak shows on "Stuff You Should Know" that I also found interesting: http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podca ... ws-worked/

It notes that Barnum went bankrupt once or twice in his long career and was once bailed out by one of his performers, the legendary "Tom Thumb."

[Sclass]

Thanks for this!

[sky]

very nice, thank you

[BRUTE]

I am very fond of reading self-help or "how to" material from the 19th Century or earlier

brute finds that writing from earlier times is great prose. he is unsure why, but it seems that people's written voices were much stronger and thicker back then.

[enigmaT120]

I don't think it's all great prose, but they certainly either had or used much larger vocabularies in their writing than people do now. And they did it with fewer years of formal education than we get now.

[vexed87]

I imagine there was a lot less 'distractions' back in those days, so I guess the ones fond of writing also read a lot. Not sure to what extent their vocabularies were larger though, I would have thought they just used different words to say the same things. If anything, the most well read among us will have larger vocabularies, what with time adding new words and all.

Thanks for sharing some timeless common sense.

[tonyedgecombe]

Perhaps time acts as a filter and we only get to read the best of that era output.

[fips]

Nice find. It is interesting to get input from a different period in time - or in fact to see how little "common sense" has differed.