High Cost Living.

Author's personal copy. Thomas Lawson's (1857-1925) personal copy of High Cost Living, his amusing 'insider's account of the pecuniary guile of an era filled with stock market machination' (ANB).

Lawson was one of his generation's most brilliant and eccentric stockbrokers. At the age of twelve, he left school to work as an office boy with a brokerage firm in Boston, and early in his career he began speculating in stocks. 'He made a considerable "killing" in railroad shares when he was only seventeen but lost his profits a few days later in another deal... He is said to have accumulated a million dollars by the time he was thirty... Despite his lack of formal education, he acquired by his own efforts an excellent command of English and a considerable degree of literary culture' (DAB).

First edition, limited edition of 1000 (this copy unnumbered); folio (35.5 x 24.5 cm); armorial bookplate to front free endpaper verso, illustrations including 4 full-page colour plates retaining original tissue guards, ads. to half-title verso, lettered in red and black; publisher's red reverse limp calf gilt, top-edge uncut, spotting to prelims, calf faded to extremities; 180pp.

Dennistoun 720.