Timeline of the development of the rare books collection

The Library is established by the Institute of Accountants.

The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) is established by Royal Charter. At ICAEW’s first meeting it was agreed that the library and furniture of the Institute of Accountants would be purchased for the sum of £400.

Francis Pixley, the first Chairman of the Library Committee, appeals to members for help in acquiring works for the Library upon the opening of Chartered Accountants’ Hall in 1893 with the ambitious target of building a complete collection of new and old books on accounting.

ICAEW purchases the first and second edition of Pacioli’s ‘Summa’ on 24 February 1902.

Cosmo Gordon completes the purchase of the Kheil collection for ICAEW. The successful purchase is reported at the meeting of the Library Committee on 7 January 1914. It includes one of the rarest books on book-keeping, Peele’s ‘Maner and fourme’ (London, 1553).

Cosmo leaves ICAEW to join the army.

A duplicate copy of Pacioli’s ‘Summa de arithmetica’ is sold to the Aberdeen Society of Chartered Accountants for £10.

On his re-appointment as ICAEW Librarian Cosmo Gordon discovers that the volume we had parted with in 1926 was not in fact a duplicate but another variant. We are able to retrieve this volume by exchanging an even handsomer copy of the first variant of the ‘Summa de arithmetica’ for it. Today, this edition can be found in the collection of the National Library of Scotland (see catalogue entry) which notes its previous life in the ICAEW collection.

December 1933

ICAEW purchases a copy of Ympyn Christoffel’s ‘Nieuwe instructie’ (Antwerp, 1543), the first book on book-keeping in Dutch, one of only two known copies. Based on Pacioli’s ‘Summa’ it contains good specimen accounts with the first use of a balance account in the ledger.

An exhibition of early books on bookkeeping is held at the Guildhall in connection with the international congress on accounting, including the second issue of Pacioli. Peele’s ‘Maner and fourme’, the first book on bookkeeping in English and the rarest in the ICAEW collection, was too valuable to exhibit at the Guildhall but was put on display at Chartered Accountants’ Hall.

The exhibition was advertised in The Times, Financial Times and other professional periodicals. On the day of opening the exhibition attracted 380 visitors.

A first edition of a two volume set of Pixley’s ‘Accountant’s Dictionary’, 1922, is gifted to the library to fill a gap in the collection. The Librarian at the time noted that “for some strange reason the Institute’s copies of the first and second editions disappeared or were destroyed sometime after publication.”

A member in the Accounting History Group, RR Coomber, re-discovers the first book on bookkeeping in English in Moscow. This is a translation into English of the Dutch book by Ympyn Christoffels which was lost at Reval (today known as Tallinn, Estonia) during the Russian Revolution in 1917 – and last heard of in 1924. It was printed by Richard Grafton in 1647, six years before he printed Peele’s book, the first one in English in the ICAEW collection.

The British embassy in Moscow helps arrange for a complete micro-film copy to be made and a bound copy produced from this for the Library collection.

ICAEW approached the Lenin Library in Moscow with an offer to purchase the volume but they were unwilling to sell their only copy. Undaunted, in 1957 ICAEW offered a copy of the Russian edition of Jones’ ‘English System’ in exchange, noting that Moscow does not appear to hold this book. Experts thought this would appeal to Moscow as a copy especially bound in red leather was known to have been sent to the Russian Court, reputedly at the request of the Tsar, around the 1870s. The attempt does not succeed!

A first edition of Richard Dafforne’s book of 1640 is advertised in the letters column of ‘Homes and Gardens’ magazine by a reader asking if it is rare – causing great excitement at ICAEW. Kheil had not managed to find a copy for his collection and it is assumed that it has rarely, if ever, come up for sale. ICAEW successfully agrees to purchase this for £50 to fill a gap in the collection.

It is not the only rare book acquisition in the year, but perhaps the least conventional route – spotted by an eagle-eyed member.

The Librarian notes that “as the Institute’s collection of early books on accounting nears completion, it is inevitable that our purchases will become less and less frequent, expenditure will decrease but the cost of individual items is bound to go up.”

Rare books turn up in the strangest of places, such as an edition of Browne’s ‘Accurate Accountant’ of 1669, found bound between ecclesiastical works at Salisbury Cathedral. A photocopy is taken and bound for the library.

The integration of the Society of Incorporated Accountants and Auditors with ICAEW results in close examination of the Society’s Library catalogue. The Society had “a sharper eye” for books on bookkeeping and accounting in the early 20th century, including a few early books on bookkeeping that help fill gaps in the ICAEW collection.

A copy of ‘The union of the two noble and illustrate families of Lancaster and York’ by Edward Hall, printed by Richard Grafton, is purchased for the collection. This historical chronicle is an unusual addition to the collection but the primary interest is the border illustrating the title page, which is clearly intended for this work, but which was curiously first used for the first surviving title on bookkeeping in English by Ympyn.

The clerk at Christ's Hospital in West Sussex allows ICAEW to microfilm the Christ's Hospital ledger kept by James Peele when he was clerk from 1562 to 1585. This is an important addition to the library as an early example of double-entry in use within England.

Another rare book turns up in an ecclesiastical college in the north, prompting a hunt among other ecclesiastical libraries.

Experts think that books on accounting were used in counting houses until they fell to pieces and many more were likely destroyed in the Great Fire of London of 1666. As churches tended not to use double entry bookkeeping these have been lightly used and preserved. This makes the early works on accounting in English more scarce than some of those printed in Italy 50 years earlier.

The Library maintains a list of 13 rare books that are needed for the collection should they ever come up for sale and one is spotted – ‘Divina Proportione’ by Luca Pacioli, including illustrations by Leonardo da Vinci. The title is purchased for £1,000.

Together with a copy of Luca Pacioli’s Euclid (purchased for just £91) this completes the ICAEW collection of works by Pacioli.

An exhibition containing 22 books from the collection is mounted at the Royal Library in Brussels for the Congress of Accounting Historians. It is the first time books from the ICAEW collection have been lent for an exhibition abroad.

The Historic Accounting Literature collection, edited by ICAEW Librarian Michael Bywater, was published between 1978 and 1980 by Scolar Press, helping to make the rare books in the ICAEW collection accessible to a wider audience of academics and historians.

The collection comprises seventy-five facsimiles of the rarest and most fragile rare books in fifty bound volumes and was originally issued to subscribers between 1978 and 1980 at a rate of two volumes per month. Only 125 sets were printed.

At a lecture in Japan Michael Bywater stresses that although this series will open up access, the library will continue to welcome scholars to the use of the collection.

The Library reaches the milestone of 150 years in existence. The history of the ICAEW Library outlines the establishment of our collection and developments in the 20th and 21st centuries.