A week or so ago, I downloaded a free Kindle edition of P. T Barnum’s 1880 book The Art of Money Getting or, Golden Rules for Making Money. (And you can, too.) I started reading it on our flight down to Florida last weekend, enjoying it immensely, and then, while visiting the St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts, in the midst of its exhibit on Sitter and Subject in Nineteenth-Century Photography, I came face to face with Barnum himself.

I was startled by the double dose of Barnum, and yet, serendipity has always been an active force in my life. So why not yet again?

Barnum’s advice book was published in 1880, so the photo below was of a much younger man, taken in 1855, and not yet looking like the huckster with which we’re familiar.

To convince you the book is worth your time, here’s one of my favorite passages, as you’ll see what happens when Barnum meets a man who puts his own selling skills to shame:

After securing the right vocation, you must be careful to select the proper location. You may have been cut out for a hotel keeper, and they say it requires a genius to “know how to keep a hotel.” You might conduct a hotel like clock-work, and provide satisfactorily for five hundred guests every day; yet, if you should locate your house in a small village where there is no railroad communication or public travel, the location would be your ruin. It is equally important that you do not commence business where there are already enough to meet all demands in the same occupation. I remember a case which illustrates this subject.

When I was in London in 1858, I was passing down Holborn with an English friend and came to the “penny shows.” They had immense cartoons outside, portraying the wonderful curiosities to be seen “all for a penny.” Being a little in the “show line” myself, I said “let us go in here.” We soon found ourselves in the presence of the illustrious showman, and he proved to be the sharpest man in that line I had ever met. He told us some extraordinary stories in reference to his bearded ladies, his Albinos, and his Armadillos, which we could hardly believe, but thought it “better to believe it than look after the proof’.” He finally begged to call our attention to some wax statuary, and showed us a lot of the dirtiest and filthiest wax figures imaginable. They looked as if they had not seen water since the Deluge. (more…)