Special Collections
Book of the Month, April 2008
Quin's Rudiments of Book-Keeping: Comprised in Six Plain Cases
Matthew Quin
Dublin: Wogan, Bean and Pike, 1777
[G.L.] 1777 [Quin]
This recent acquisition for the Goldsmiths’ Library adds another item to its collection of early printed books on book-keeping, one of the notable features of the Goldsmiths’ Library. A simple search in the SHL online catalogue under the subject heading: ‘Bookkeeping -- Early works to 1800’ brings up 97 entries, some of which are in the De Morgan Library, and others in the Kress Library’s microfilm collection (held by Senate House Library) and many more in the Goldsmiths’ Library. Most of the works from the latter two collections can of course be found on the database: Making of the Modern World: Goldsmiths’-Kress Library of Economic Literature 1450-1850.
Matthew Quin’s little work of around 134 pages seems to have been quite popular, as different editions have been published, but this copy is the only 1777 Dublin edition published by Wogan, Bean and Pike held in the UK, as currently recorded on COPAC. The publisher Mr. Wogan, of No. 23, Old-Bridge, in his advertisement dated March 1777 on the final printed page of the book, states that this is of course an “improved” edition.
The importance of this genre at a time economic growth and business expansion in educating “persons of either sex” is underlined by the range of the works available, as is the moral dimension argued by Matthew Quin himself. The closing “essay on the fit manner of initiating youth to temperance and moral rectitude” emphasizes the moral alongside the commercial message, and finishes by making its point very clearly: “The Dutch have a proverb, ‘That none need be poor who keep correct Books.’” Thus the keeping of correct accounts will assist accurate book-keepers to “stand guarded against extravagance, and all the destructive vices flowing from a mad intemperance; consequently a serene and lasting felicity are the delicious fruits of a moral rectitude”.
Another recent acquisition for the Goldsmiths’ Library, published in 1764, was a further work in this genre: William Everard’s Mercantile Book-Keeping, and similarly uncommon, with no English location listed on COPAC.
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