An Address to bankers, Merchants, Tradesmen, &c.

Notes

An unrecorded issue of the prospectus for E. T. Jones's work on book-keeping, one of three printings in 1795, the other two printed in Bristol, which is where Jones practised as an accountant. This Address, the half-title to which reads "Twenty Minutes useful Consideration for the Man of Business", is actually a lengthy prospectus for a longer work on book-keeping which Jones planned for the following year; this duly appeared as Jones's English system of book-keeping by single and double entry, for which he was able to attract more than 4000 subscribers. Jones patented a hybrid system that attempted to combine the simplicity of single entry book-keeping with the arithmetic checks on accuracy provided by the double-entry system. His claim that the system was infallible was contested however, and he was the object of several attacks by contemporary proponents of the Italian system. Although his system was never adopted, his 1796 work was undoubtedly the first English work on accounting to achieve international renown; it was immediately republished in America, and translated into German, Dutch, Danish, French, Italian and Russian. Jones made important contributions to book-keeping, advocating the use of tabular account books, subsidiary ledgers, control accounts, and other devices designed to save labour and to adapt Pacioli's fifteenth-century Italian system to the demands of the nineteenth century. (Michael Chatfield, in History of accounting: an international encyclopaedia.)