What does it take to be successful in business? In the letter printed below, a doctor advised a brother who contemplated entering trade in a certain small Massachusetts town in the year 1807. In spite of its quaint tone, the letter raises interesting questions. Is the doctor's analysis of the situation essentially sound? What do you think of the qualifications he lists for success in trade in this instance? Does this simple consideration of the question have meaning for other times and business situations?

Looking across the long twentieth century, this article tracks the rise and fall of one form of anti-competition regulation: the certificate of public convenience. Designed to curb “destructive competition” in certain industries, such as transportation and banking, certificate laws prevented firms from entering those industries unless they could convince regulators that they would satisfy an unmet public demand for goods or services. This history highlights how lawmakers used similar techniques in governing infrastructure and finance—two fields that are not often studied together. It also shows that state regulation both prefigured legal change at the federal level and then lagged behind it, suggesting that different dynamics have been in play at each level of governance in devising competition policy over the last century.

Someone could go a long way toward telling the story of my life through its magazines: the Highlights my parents gave me, determined that my small self should be as entertained and enlightened as possible; my grandparents’ neatly collected Readers’ Digests, which I eagerly read until learning my freshman year in college that they were hopelessly bourgeois; the New Yorkers I loved and displayed in my graduate student apartment, the Vanity Fairs I loved and hid under the bed. Magazines tell the story of who I was supposed to be and who I wanted to be. Or perhaps they don't; how much of what the magazines meant to me is visible in the historical record? I didn't purchase all that I read, after all, nor did I read all that I purchased. A magazine I loved one year might embarrass me the next, and then find its way back into favor, my subscription all the while remaining unchanged. Magazines, in short, are both perplexing and promising subjects of analysis, with the question of how they create communities of readers posing perhaps the most promising and perplexing question of all.

In striking contrast to Sam Johnson's erratic dictionary commented on in the last issue of the Bulletin is the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences whose second volume appeared during October (Macmillan). The book covers parts of the alphabet letters “A” and “B” — beginning with an article on alliances by Professor Sidney B. Fay of Harvard University and ending with brigandage, by Carleton Beals.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the rubber tire industry faced debilitating challenges, mostly brought about by changes in the industry's retail structure and exacerbated by the Great Depression. Segments of the industry attempted to use the New Deal's NRA codes to solve these new problems and stabilize the tire market, but the tire manufacturing and tire retailing codes were patent failures. Instead of leading to cartelization and higher prices, which is what most scholars assume the NRA codes did, the tire industry codes actually led to even more fragmentation and price-cutting.