Posts Tagged ‘handbook’
“I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.”*…
During his long life, Daniel Defoe was confidant to a king and victim of the pillory.
A writer of astonishing productivity, Defoe is mainly known to modern audiences for such novels as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders. But he was also arguably history’s greatest business writer, and his output includes probably the first English business manual, The Complete English Tradesman, from which, even today, you can learn a great deal about commerce, credit, and capitalism. It first appeared in 1726 — when Adam Smith was roughly 3 years old — and was reprinted in the colonies by no less a figure than Benjamin Franklin, himself a comparably entrepreneurial polymath and man of many faces. For a while it was a popular handbook for merchants on both sides of the Atlantic…
The author of Robinson Crusoe, who dealt with ups and downs as an entrepreneur, also penned one of history’s most useful business manuals: “Daniel Defoe’s hard-earned lessons on business and life.”
* Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
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As we consider the source, we might spare a thought for LeRoy Robert Ripley; he died on this date in 1949. A cartoonist, entrepreneur, and publisher, he created and parlayed Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, a successful panel series in daily newspapers into a radio series then a TV series, and into a string of museums, or Odditoriums as he billed them.
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