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

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GRAPHIC PRESENTATION

Playfair. Out of curiosity. I wrote asking that the book be reserved and that a price quotation be sent. A few weeks later, upon returning from out of the city, I was astonished to find the EngHsh book seller's bill for ten shillings, six pence. Elsewhere in my accumulated mail was the book itself. On the title page the publisher's price is printed, "Price 10s. 6d." Neither the New York Public Library nor the Library of Congress had this book. Each of these libraries has since photostatted my volume for inclusion with the few examples of other Playfair works which they own. About 1916, I had various photostats made from these Playfair books, but had never followed up clues on Playfair, the man. The Playfair search has widened since the chance inquiry made at the Huntington Library a year ago. Questions still continue.

With all that Playfair did to show the effectiveness of graphic chart methods from his first book, published in 1786 at the age of twenty-seven, till his death in 1823, why have not graphic charts become more thoroughly established as a universal language? Another interest was aroused as to the part which engineers have played in the development of the graphic language, since I noted in California that William Playfair was apprenticed in Scotland as a machinist and later became a draftsman for James Watt before writing on a wide variety of subjects.