The Fate of the Edsel and Other Business Adventures

New York: Harper & Row, 1963. First Edition [stated]. Hardcover. Good. 182, [10] pages. Slight soiling to rear board, board corners somewhat worn. John Brooks (December 5, 1920 - July 27, 1993) was a writer and longtime contributor to The New Yorker magazine, where he worked for many years as a staff writer, specializing in financial topics. Brooks was also the author of several books, both fiction and nonfiction, the best known of which was an examination of the financial shenanigans of the 1960s Wall Street bull market. In a field known for bone-dry adjectives, writer Brooks lent his business writing a new panache. In describing Ford's Edsel, for instance, Brooks wrote in his best-known New Yorker essay that the newly engineered vehicle was "clumsy, powerful, dowdy, gauche, well-meaning - a deKooning woman." Topics covered in this book include the Ford Motor Company's Edsel (now a popular symbol for a commercial failure); security analyst Walter Gutman; Clarence Saunders and the Piggly Wiggly Stores; price-fixing and bid-rigging conspiracies in the electrical-manufacturing industry; and the London Stock Exchange. Derived from a Kirkus review: Further adventures in business on and off the Street offers a refreshingly zestful approach to the matter of getting and spending and sometimes losing money. The major treat is the spectacle of the Edsel debacle, "a modern American anti-success story" which started with delusionary dreams of glory, proceeded through the wildest reaches of motivational research, evolved in a veil of secrecy accorded only to the atomic bomb until the final numbing striptease, to the nostalgic recall of "the crew", only temporarily battle-scarred, of their greatest if most disastrous campaign. Other business-fun-and-games turn up Walter Gutman, who dubs himself "a Proust in Wall Street" and whose unique market letter takes off on unpredictable if predictably spectacular-flights of philosophy; the battle of Memphis country boy Clarence Saunders over a corner in Piggly Wiggly with Wall Street slickers, who won; the strange inability to communicate brought to light by the G.E. scandal probe, and a final holiday glimpse of Threadneedle Street, Wall Street's opposite number in the City, London, -- with the Exchange, Lloyd's, Hoare & Co. and the Bank of England for fanfare. An aperitif that is unexpectedly entertaining.