Holiday Gift Suggestion: A Book -- Double Entry, Jane Gleeson-White

Link here to the bookkeeper of Venice, the WSJ's book review of Double Entry, by Jane Gleeson-White.

I never, never buy business books -- I used to, but haven't bought one in ages. But I might make an exception for this one. This looks fun.

Double-entry bookkeeping was greeted by the kind of ecstatic commentary normally reserved for scientific discoveries. Goethe referred to it as "among the finest inventions of mankind."

Why such excitement? For a start, double entry represents a feat of quantification. Every asset or liability and each exchange is given a monetary value and recorded in the same currency.

The German sociologist Werner Sombart, author of "Modern Capitalism," a six-volume work of intellectual history published before World War II, went so far as to claim that, by encouraging regular record-keeping, mathematical order and the reduction of events to numerical abstractions, double entry contained the germ of the later scientific revolution.