Throwback Thursday: The Complete Business Register
Throwback Thursday- its here again.
We choose our throwback on Thursday morning before we publish these blogs and post to Facebook. While it may be easier to get the process going earlier in the week, choosing the day of keeps it exciting. That process is a story for another week, though.
This week, after going through a large stack of insurance polices, titles and other financial documents across the decades; we pulled out an old, slightly beaten up, hardback book. The cover, very worn, doesn’t exactly spell out what’s inside.
Opening up to the inside cover gives us all the details.
This book is titled: ‘ THE Complete Business Register, (REVISED AND IMPROVED )’ and its certainly an antique.
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According to the inside cover, pictured below, this register was published in 1894. That’s two years before Fitterer’s Furniture opened for business. The price is certainly reflective – sold by subscription at $3.75. The second page, pictured below, gives detailed instructions and hints for using the register. An insert with examples follows.
Hints and Instructions + Examples |
Reading through all of that text truly makes you appreciate the advancement in technology over the last 100+ years. The manual bookkeeping process is far different than what businesses are used to today – that’s no surprise. However, when you start reading through all of this (very tiny!) text and think about the time someone, somewhere spent typing it out without digital equipment, its very impressive. We even tried copying the text onto a page of this blog for easier reading, and its a TON of words. The first six bolded headings took nearly a full page on a word document at 12pt font.
There are clearly some typos and some grammatical errors – without the ease of a modern backspace button, spell check feature and all of the other things we enjoy today, how could there not be a few errors?
Thumbing through the book , there are records of cash and credit sales from the years 1899 – 1909. Though the book has the space and ability to help chart things like profit and losses, Fitterer’s appears to have kept it fairly basic in this particular record book. The weekly totals of cash and credit sales and purchases were penciled in until the last time the book was used in 1909. Monthly totals seem to have stopped being tracked (in this book anyway) sometime around 1901.
Just having the opportunity to flip through the pages of a record book from the early 1900s is pretty amazing.
Enjoy browsing the photos of this antique record book, and if you get a chance stop by and see it sometime! History in your hands is a special thing.
March 1907 Records- Each of page of the first half of this records book has similar records from 1901-1909 |
Complete Means Complete – Informational charts for Interest, etc. |
Reviews before the Internet – Testimonials and reviews of the register from various business owners, etc. |