I visited the Huntington Library on the last day before starting North and East. While observing some unusually fine types of early bookbinding and the repairs made to the bindings on some of the Library's most precious volumes, it occurred to me to ask the Librarian, Dr. Leslie Bliss, what books the library had by William Playfair, to whom this book is dedicated. In a few minutes there was brought to us the only one they had listed under William Playfair:

STATISTICAL ACCOUNT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

by D. F. DoNNANT

•

Translated from the French by William Playfair

With an Addition on the Trade to America,

For the Use of Commercial Men,

By the Sanie.

•

London

As we looked through this book, I exclaimed to Dr. Bliss, "Here is the earliest example of a sector chart," and then noticed beneath the one illustration the inscription, "This Newly invented Method is intended to shew the Proportions between the divisions in a Striking Manner." See Page 81.

I was also much struck by the fact that the subject matter of the book referred to industry, commerce, and finance in the United States, that the preface by William Playfair mentioned conversations between himself and Thomas Jefferson, that the book was inscribed to Jefferson, and that twentyfive copies had been sent to him.

When I wrote Graphic Methods in 1914. I had never heard of William Playfair. Two years later a friend in Pittsburgh sent me a marked catalogue of a London bookseller listing a book Lineal Arithmetic, 1798, by William