From the Financial Times, February 14:
A rare copy of a 15th-century printed book that set down the principles of modern accounting and double-entry bookkeeping is to go up for sale with an estimated value of up to $1.5m. Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan friar, mathematics professor and friend of Leonardo da Vinci, published his Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita in 1494, just 40 years after Gutenberg’s innovations in moveable type launched the printing revolution. Due to go on view on February 21 at Christie’s London showrooms, the Summa de Arithmetica is a compendium of everything known at the time about mathematics, but also a practical, how-to guide to succeeding in business. At the time of its publication, Italy’s thriving city states were home to family businesses with international networks of trade, which required increasingly robust methods of management and financial control. Double-entry bookkeeping had been in use in Italy for at least a century, but Pacioli is credited with laying down the principles underlying it in the Summa, influencing the teaching of finance for generations of accountants up to the modern era.....MUCH MOREHere is the February 21 press release (how did the FT scoop Christie's?)
RELEASE: The Birth of Modern Business | Christie's to auction Pacioli's Summa de arithmetica
And Christie's page for the June 12 auction:
Summa de Arithmetica: The Birth of Modern Business
Previously on the bean counter channel:
July 2012
"How a Medieval Friar Forever Changed Finance"
May 2013
Steve Keen on Quantitative Easing and Double Entry Bookkeeping
Sepetmber 2015
Signposts: It's The End Of Accounting As We Know It
November 2015
"Of Trading and the Perfect Trader" (and Izabella still writes like a boy)
