One thing that Jane Gleeson-White's book "Double Entry" is not and that is boring! Indeed, it's one of the most elegantly written accounts of the history of accounting I have read.
It charts the epic journey of the humble device that showed how to count the cost of everything, from the Doge’s Palace to the acrobatics of John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory. It's the story of double-entry bookkeeping, from its first known origins in late thirteenth-century Italy to its takeover of the twenty-first-century global economy.
For sixty years I've been a 'Buchhalter', a 'Rekenmeester', a chartered accountant, a company auditor, a 'chef-comptable', a group financial controller, a chartered management consultant, a finance manager, a bursar, an accounting software programmer, and a lot of other things besides - my wife will be happy to tell you about all those 'besides' - and I wished I had read Jane Gleeson-White's book all those sixty years ago.
You can buy this beautifully presented book at www.booktopia.com.au, or you can read it online - or at least "test-drive" it - at archive.org.
