An oldie but a goodie - The Art of Money Getting
I have been browsing Project Guttenburg to see if I could find any money books that are out of copyright (project guttenburg seeks to put online all books that that out of copyright and therefore free to download by anyone).
And I found P.T. Barnum's Art of Money Getting which was written in the early decades of the 20th century. Barnum was a famous circus entrepreneur, and his book shows extraordinary shrewdness about money, considering the time he wrote the book (when most people didn't have a clue, and money books weren't widely available). Here's the opening paragraph on his section on debt:
Young men starting in life should avoid running into debt. There is scarcely anything that drags a person down like debt. It is a slavish position to get in, yet we find many a young man, hardly out of his "teens," running in debt. He meets a chum and says, "Look at this: I have got trusted for a new suit of clothes." He seems to look upon the clothes as so much given to him; well, it frequently is so, but, if he succeeds in paying and then gets trusted again, he is adopting a habit which will keep him in poverty through life.
The language is gloriously retro, but strangely nothing seems to have changed a century later! He also goes on at length about "location" and it's importance to success (probably one of the first people to articulate this), plus other money matters. This is an early self-help book that is genuinely insightful by a successful man from the era where you could go from rags to riches.
Here's the Project Gutenburg link if you want to read it.
