The latest financial crisis has people looking for perspective. The most obvious kind, with experts diagnosing the prospects of a depression, is comparisons to the crash of 1929. One source that's in demand is The Great Crash, 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith, the late Harvard economist.
In Manhattan, ground zero of the latest debacle, booksellers can't seem to hold onto the 1955 chronicle of last century's Great Depression. At the Barnes and Noble on Columbia University's campus, a manager said he had one copy on order but was going to ask for 10 more because customers have been clamoring. The store on 46th Street and 5th Avenue has one that was specially ordered but is otherwise sold out. The shop at Union Square has one copy and the one on 54th and Lexington Avenue, at the Citigroup Center, has one in stock and one reserved.
Copies of the Crash are even scarcer at Borders. The megastore at the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle has three copies on order and the branch on Wall Street has a lone copy.
Of course, Galbraith, who died in 2006, could have predicted that his 194-page book might come back in vogue. In his updated introduction penned in 1997, he wrote, "Each time it has been about to pass from print and the bookstores, another speculative episode — another bubble or the ensuing misfortune — has stirred interest in the history of this, the great modern case of boom and collapse, which led to an unforgiving depression."
Clearly keeping tabs on his book proceeds, Galbraith even conceded to being distressed that he never saw his title at the bookshops in LaGuardia Airport. When he finally decided to mention it to the woman who ran the shops, she explained that a book with such a title would not fly as airplane reading.
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