The Art of Money Getting by P. T. Barnum: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download

Free edition · The Art of Money Getting · 1880

The Art of Money Getting

By P. T. Barnum — First published 1880 — (Published 1880) · All P. T. Barnum books

Word Count ~14,000 words (estimated)

Reading Time Approx. 50 minutes (estimated)

Copyright Status Public Domain in the US; check local laws

Source Project Gutenberg #8581

Source Edition Standard Ebooks edition, based on Project Gutenberg #8581

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The first two paragraphs of the Introduction

In the United States, where we have more land than people, it is not at all difficult for persons in good health to make money. In this comparatively new field there are so many avenues of success open, so many vocations which are not crowded, that any person of either sex who is willing, at least for the time being, to engage in any respectable occupation that offers, may find lucrative employment.

Those who really desire to attain an independence, have only to set their minds upon it, and adopt the proper means, as they do in regard to any other object which they wish to accomplish, and the thing is easily done. But however easy it may be found to make money, I have no doubt many of my hearers will agree it is the most difficult thing in the world to keep it. The road to wealth is, as Dr. Franklin truly says, “as plain as the road to the mill.” It consists simply in expending less than we earn; that seems to be a very simple problem. Mr. Micawber, one of those happy creations of the genial Dickens, puts the case in a strong light when he says that to have annual income of twenty pounds per annum, and spend twenty pounds and sixpence, is to be the most miserable of men; whereas, to have an income of only twenty pounds, and spend but nineteen pounds and sixpence is to be the happiest of mortals. Many of my readers may say, “we understand this: this is economy, and we know economy is wealth; we know we can’t eat our cake and keep it also.” Yet I beg to say that perhaps more cases of failure arise from mistakes on this point than almost any other. The fact is, many people think they understand economy when they really do not.

The excerpt is the first two paragraphs of the Introduction: the claim that a country with more land than people makes money easy to earn, then the turn to keeping it, where Franklin’s road to the mill and Dickens’s Micawber, with his twenty pounds and sixpence, carry the point that economy is the whole art.

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Further Reading

Read next: Franklin’s autobiography, and Veblen on what the money is spent on

Free edition

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

By Benjamin Franklin · The book Barnum quotes on the plain road to wealth

Free edition

The Theory of the Leisure Class

By Thorstein Veblen · Twenty years later, a colder look at what the money gets spent on

The Art of Money Getting by P. T. Barnum: Summary, Ideas & Arguments

This edition pairs a summary and analysis of The Art of Money Getting with the text: the eighteen-paragraph Introduction, then the twenty rules Barnum prints under their own headings, from Don’t Mistake Your Vocation to Preserve Your Integrity. P. T. Barnum published the lecture in 1880, late in a career spent running a museum, touring a show and standing on platforms, and the book carries the marks of the hall: he addresses his hearers, asks questions and lets their objections in. Nothing here is systematic; there is a showman’s opinion of what makes a man prosper, offered as advice and proved by example.

The Introduction is the longest piece, and the argument is made there rather than asserted. Barnum grants that making money is easy in a new country, then spends his force on keeping it. Franklin’s road to wealth is as plain as the road to the mill, and Dickens’s Micawber, with his twenty pounds and sixpence, is the cautionary figure. Economy is not meanness: the farmer’s wife who will not burn a second candle but spends thirty dollars on ribbons is his false economist, and Franklin’s penny wise and pound foolish names her. The remedy is arithmetic, a ledger with a column for necessaries and one for luxuries. Franklin’s Autobiography, the book he quotes most often, is free here too.

The first rules are about position rather than conduct. A man must find the vocation his nature fits, since a born mechanic pushed into a pulpit will spend his life working uphill; he must put that trade where the customers are, the lesson of the London showman of 1858 whose tongue was the sharpest in the penny-show line and whose location wasted it; and he must keep clear of debt, a slavish position, illustrated by the Quaker’s advice about manure, the apprentice Horatio who could never overtake a snail, and John Randolph’s pay as you go. Perseverance and self-exertion follow, with Davy Crockett on being sure you are right and then going ahead.

The rest of the book turns on money already made. A man should depend on his own exertions, hire the best tools he can get and not get above his business: Girard, Stewart, Astor and Vanderbilt, poor boys who died rich, are the proof, and the heir born with a golden spoon is the counter-example. Genin the hatter’s Jenny Lind ticket is the model advertisement, and the usher who wanted to whip a customer is reminded that the customer pays. The book closes on integrity. The Theory of the Leisure Class, published at the end of the century, asks what all that spending was for.

The text is the Standard Ebooks edition, set from a Project Gutenberg transcription of the 1880 book, and it keeps the Introduction and all twenty headings as the book prints them. Read it for the argument or for the anecdotes; either way it is short, blunt and specific enough to argue with. The rules are dated in places, since the newspaper is the great engine of publicity here, but the ledger and the sofa that cost thirty thousand dollars have not aged. The rest of the Philosophy Classics shelf is free in the same three formats.

Historical Context

The lecture belongs to the great age of the American platform. Through the 1870s and 1880s, lyceums, mechanics’ institutes and literary societies paid speakers to stand in front of an audience and improve it, and the moral lecture on success was one of the staple turns. Barnum was a professional showman before he was an author, and he wrote for the hall rather than the desk: the text keeps the second person, the direct question and the pause for a laugh. Its premise is the one his audience had heard all their lives, a country with more land than people where any sober person can find lucrative employment.

Most of the evidence comes out of Barnum’s own career, and the career was transatlantic. The New York Museum, whose usher he instructs in politeness, was his; the London of the penny shows, which he visited in 1858, taught him what a bad location costs; the Duke of Wellington, who asked him at his first appearance before Queen Victoria what sphere Tom Thumb’s parents moved in, taught him what England thought of a carpenter’s son. The Jenny Lind auction at Castle Garden, where a hatter paid two hundred and twenty-five dollars for the first ticket, is the book’s best advertisement for advertising.

The book is also a document of its moment in the history of advice. Franklin is quoted again and again, Dickens’s Micawber more than once, and the mixture tells you what kind of book this is: Franklin’s arithmetic with a Victorian novel’s cautionary fool. Solomon supplies the proverbs, and for all its dollars and cents the tone is closer to the pulpit than to the counting house. The 1870s had brought a long depression and a sharp lesson about credit, and the warnings about debt and endorsement answer that experience directly.

Key Ideas & Arguments

• Economy is not meanness: The Introduction’s central distinction. Saving candle-ends while spending thirty dollars on ribbons is the false economy Barnum attacks; true economy is a margin between income and outgo, checked in a ledger with two columns. It is a habit to be trained, not a temperament.
• Vocation before capital: A man should enter the trade his nature fits, not the one his father picked. Barnum offers himself as the example: no love of machinery, unable to whittle a cider tap that would not leak, useless as a watchmaker. Aptitude is the first capital, and it costs nothing.
• Debt as a slavish position: Debt robs a man of self-respect and sets interest working against him while he sleeps. Barnum allows credit to merchants buying to sell at a profit, but borrowing for what you eat and wear keeps a man poor. Pay as you go is the remedy.
• There is no such thing as luck: Barnum denies that fortune is handed out by chance. A man may find a purse in the street once, but he is as likely to lose it as to find it; like causes produce like effects, and a failure has reasons even when the man cannot see them.
• Advertising is sowing: The public must know what you have, and must be told often. Barnum compares advertising to the farmer’s sowing before reaping, and tells how Genin the hatter turned a two-hundred-and-twenty-five-dollar auction bid into ten thousand extra hats a year. A spurious article is bought once and denounced.
• Integrity last and first: The twentieth rule is the floor the other nineteen stand on. Barnum takes the old miser’s advice to his sons, to get money honestly if they can, and calls it not only wicked but stupid, since a man found dishonest has every avenue closed to him.

Core Arguments & Influence

• Spending less than you earn: The arithmetic is almost embarrassingly simple, and Barnum says so: the road to wealth consists in expending less than we earn. What makes the book longer than a sentence is his account of why people fail at it. Vanity, the fear of Mrs. Grundy and the habit of economy in one direction only pull the outgo up to the income and past it. His test is the two-column ledger and his remedy a margin laid by at interest.
• Character as capital: Politeness, charity, discretion and honesty are recommended as policy as well as duty, and the book is frank about the order of reasons. The liberal man commands patronage; the employer who insults a paying customer loses him and his friends; a man known to be honest has the purses of the community at his disposal. Barnum argues that reputation is capital, then adds that integrity also secures a peace no money can buy.
• The self-made man and his witnesses: The book’s favourite proof is the poor boy who dies rich. Girard begins as a cabin boy and leaves nine millions; Stewart arrives as a poor Irish boy and pays taxes on a million and a half a year; Astor is a farmer’s boy with twenty millions; Vanderbilt rows a boat from Staten Island and leaves fifty. Against them stands the heir with the golden spoon. In England the business makes the man, in America the man makes the business.
• Money as servant and master: Debt, endorsement and speculation are treated as one subject: money that works against you. Barnum’s figure is fire, an excellent servant and a terrible master, and his examples run from the young man trusted for a suit of clothes to the retired man who signs a friend’s note without security and is ruined twice over, by the loss and by helping to ruin the friend.
• Advice as performance: The book is a lecture, and it argues the way a good lecturer does, by anecdote, proverb and direct challenge rather than by steps. Cuvier and the student in the cow skin, Pat the waiter and the untasted soup, the Irish pilot who knows every rock in the channel: each is a point made in a story the audience could carry home. That is why the advice survives as sentences rather than as a system.

Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Art of Money Getting?

The download is the complete lecture: the eighteen-paragraph Introduction, the twenty rules under Barnum’s own headings and the last paragraph on money as a friend to humanity. Nothing is cut, and no rule is paraphrased in place of itself. The text is the Standard Ebooks edition, set from the Project Gutenberg transcription, and the headings are printed as the 1880 book gives them.

Around the text the page supplies what a lecture of this kind needs: ten groups that pair the rules in the book’s order, six notes on the arguments that carry it, five themes that follow the advice across the whole and a short account of the platform and the decade.

The files come in three formats with the same text and the same headings. The EPUB opens in Apple Books, Calibre and most Android readers; the AZW3 is the file for a Kindle, by cable or through Send to Kindle; the KEPUB is what Kobo reads best. No account is needed, and nothing in the downloads is locked or time limited.

• Based on the Standard Ebooks Edition, via Standard Ebooks, whose text of The Art of Money Getting is set from a Project Gutenberg transcription and keeps the Introduction and the twenty headings.
• Complete text, Introduction and twenty rules The whole lecture as printed in 1880, with no rule abridged and no passage replaced by a summary.
• Ten parts in the book’s own order The twenty rules paired two at a time, each pair described in about fifty words, so a rule can be found from the contents.
• EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files The same text in three formats, for Apple Books, Kindle and Kobo, with nothing to install beyond your reading app.

Part of: Philosophy Classics · 1880s