When ledgers *were* ledgers

in #history5 years ago

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Among my uncle's belonging was a "Day Book". This is a different thing from a ledger. In manual accounting days, you'd make a record of each transaction as they happened and only later transferred to the relevant ledgers.

I still do this, as it happens, for keeping track of my personal spending. I note what I spend when I spend it and then go through and summarize them on a spreadsheet. When I'm being a good boy, I do this at the end of each day, except when I'm not and it can slip a little. It gives me a much clearer feel for where I am financially day to day.

This particular book though was not used for accounting. Page 181 (pictured) and many more thereafter is completely unused. The beginning part of the book is notes on a series of chess games. I'm not sure where these were annotated from, copied from a book or the newspaper or, I don't know, live at the tableside! And I'm not totally clear whose handwriting it is. I have a hunch it's my grandfather (who was a book-keeper, so perhaps he lifted it from work), but it could easily have been my uncle or my father.

Another quirky thing to note is that the red ruling on the pages is not consistent page to page as you'd expect if it were mechanically printed. Is it possible that each sheet was ruled by hand?

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