Two years ago the Baker Library made its first major excursion into the field of early Italian business source material when Mr. H. Gordon Selfridge deposited with it a number of account books belonging to a branch of the Medici family. This summer the Society acquired, through the generosity of Mr. Edward J. Frost, of Boston, some account books and other business records of the great Barberini and Sciarra-Colonna families of Rome. This collection of eighty-seven vellum-bound volumes, covering the activities one of Italy's most powerful families from 1618 to 1816, takes up the story of Italian banking almost where the earlier books left it.

The man who regards the “elder times” as the good old days is a feature of all ages. In the sixteenth century the coach was denounced as a dangerous innovation, and in the seventeenth, conservatives lamented the crowding of the roads with the new vehicles, and found in them a menace to the public integrity. In a book written in 1837, by William Bridges Adams on English Pleasure Carriages the history of the invention and progress of wheeled carriages and the stir caused by their introduction into the various countries is amusingly given, as a preface to a lengthy description of the construction of the various types of pleasure carriages then in use.