Author
George S. Clason
The map publisher whose Babylonian parables became the most enduring short book on saving.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
George Samuel Clason was born in Louisiana, Missouri, in 1874, served in the army during the Spanish-American War, and founded the Clason Map Company in Denver, which published the first road atlas of the United States and Canada.
From 1926 he wrote a series of short pamphlets on thrift and financial success, set in ancient Babylon, which banks and insurance companies distributed to their customers in large numbers. The most popular were collected as The Richest Man in Babylon.
He died in 1957. The book has never been out of print, and its seven cures for a lean purse are cited by most later personal finance writers as the rules they started from.
The signature
Clason's method is the parable: a lesson delivered as a story about a scribe, a merchant or a moneylender in a city three thousand years gone. His signature is the deliberately archaic voice and the rule simple enough to survive a century unchanged: a part of all you earn is yours to keep.