JONES, Edward Thomas.

£2,250 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Jones's English System of Book-Keeping, Second edition, following the first of the same year, of perhaps the most famous and influential of all English books on accountancy. The work went through at least sixteen editions in England alone, also being translated into German, French, Italian and Russian. The 19th century "opened with the continuing reverberations of the publication in 1796 of Edward Thomas Jones's English System of book-keeping... This book was translated into several European languages, and gave rise to much controversy and provoked the publication of various 'national' systems of book-keeping. The passions inspired by Jones's book are without equal in the history of book-keeping and accountancy" (Yamey, introduction to ICAEW catalogue).These passions were the result of Jones's attack upon the Italian method. Jones "heralded the coming of a new method of book-keeping by single entry, which would be much simpler to understand and operate, enable all errors to be detected without much delay or trouble, provide valuable information not yielded readily by the double-entry system, and, finally, would banish the possibility of fraudulent book-keeping entries. The panegyrics lavished by the author on his new system were coupled with an intemperate attack on the so-called Italian system of double entry, which, in the course of a lengthy castigation, was said to be delusive, conducive to error, and capable 'of being converted into a cloak, for the vilest statements tha

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