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1-800-99-BAUMAN

Investing in Purchasing Power

Kenneth S. VAN STRUM

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Item#: 79540 price:$750.00

FIRST EDITION OF VAN STRUM’S INVESTING IN PURCHASING POWER, 1925

VAN STRUM, Kenneth S. Investing in Purchasing Power. Boston, New York, and Philadelphia: Barron’s, 1925. Octavo, original navy cloth, original dust jacket. $750.

First edition of this pre-Crash investment guide emphasizing the advantages of buying stocks over buying bonds.

In this work, Kenneth Van Strum asserts that ownership of common stocks could serve as a valuable means of preserving purchasing power. Van Strum believed that stocks were superior to bonds as they were more resistant to the effects of inflation. However, though many economists warned about the risks of foolish over-investment in stocks and lack of diversification, some of these theories have nevertheless been blamed for the 1929 crash. Nonetheless, this was still one of the earliest works to recognize some of the unique qualities inherent to stocks.

Book fine, dust jacket near-fine with a few shallow chips to top edge. A handsome copy.

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Aquatint Copperplate process by which the plate is “bitten” by exposure to acid. By changing the areas of the plate that are exposed and the length of time the plate is submerged in the acid bath, the engraver can obtain fine and varying shades of gray that closely resemble watercolor washes. Although the name contains the word “tint”, this is a black-and-white printing process; aquatint plates can often be hand colored, however.
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Engraving Illustration produced by carving lines into a metal plate. This is an intaglio process, in which ink is poured over the plate, then wiped from the surface, leaving ink only in the recesses made by the engraver’s tools. The image is then transferred by pressing thick dampened paper against the metal plate with great force—requiring engravings to be printed on a separate stock and separate press from any text.
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Marginalia Handwritten notes made in the margins by a previous owner.
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Wood-Engraving Engraving made with the graver or burin on the cross-section of a piece of boxwood; the harder wood and finer tools allow for more delicate, finely detailed images, while the block can still be set in the page alongside text and printed on the same stock as the text. While much older, wood engravings enjoyed an important renaissance in the late eighteenth century through Thomas Bewick and continued in popularity thorugh the nineteenth century.
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