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Kenneth O. Elvik, Editor IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY
BOOK REVIEWS
Stephen A. Zeff, (ed.), Asset Appreciation, Business Income and Price-Level Accounting: 1918-1935, (New York: Arno Press, Reprint Edition, 1976, pp. 208, $28.00).
Reviewed by Louis Goldberg, Professor Emeritus Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia
When Henry W. Sweeney's book, Stabilized Accounting was re-issued in 1964, that author included as a prefatory essay a paper entitled "Forty Years After: Or Stabilized Accounting Revisited." Among the many points that he made in that essay, was one to the effect that "the literature of even the 1920's was often superior to many of the pseudo-scientific 'vanity' outpourings since 1936." Sweeney's observation is borne out by the papers on accounting problems arising from changing price levels which are reprinted in this volume, all of them having appeared between 1918 and 1935.
The papers are reproduced by a photographic process from the original publications, complete with some few misprints, which are not serious in themselves, and the original page numbering, which results in the absence of consecutive numbering of pages through-out the volume. The need to reduce the size of the various journal pages to the format of an octavo book has resulted in different sizes of type, that of one article being so small as to be difficult for any but the sharpest eyes to cope with.
Of the eighteen papers included, nine are by Sweeney himself, two by W. A. Paton, two by Fritz Schmidt, and one by each of Living-ston Middleditch Jr., H. C. Daines, Max J. Wasserman, Ralph Cough-enour Jones and Solomon Fabricant.
For the most part, these early articles are written in readily under-standable English, uncluttered by jargon or verbiage, and the argu-ments are clear, direct and forceful. In an introductory essay, the editor, Dr. Zeff, explains that when Stabilized Accounting was pub-lished in 1936 it represented only a portion of Sweeney's doctoral thesis, from which, because of publishing constraints, much of the
