History of Accounting Doesn't Add Up

A HISTORY OF double-entry accounting? Not a sexy prospect. The very idea evokes rows of half-starved, bent-over Dickensian clerks, with visors and arthritic hands, scribbling in giant, unending registers. But maybe this is wrong—double-entry is, after all, the tool by which financiers calculate profit and loss. Profit can be very sexy, and as Lehman Brothers and Greece illustrate, there is great drama in massive loss. The story of accounting should, at this moment of economic crisis, give a sense of the passion, glory, and pitfalls of this seemingly banal practice.