Books in Charlie Munger's Library:
Influence by Robert Cialdini,
Einstein by Walter Isaacson,
Go East Young Man (memoir of William O. Douglas),
Eugene Meyer bio (Father of Kay Graham, Chair of Fed in 30s),
Max Planck bio,
John Kenneth Galbraith’s Ambassadors Journal,
Set of the Harvard Classics,
Copey of Harvard by James Donald Adams,
Autobiography of Mark Twain,
Federalist Papers,
Capital (history of Capital Group) by Charley Ellis,
Current Value Line Binder,
Set of Shakespeare at the top,
Possibly a set of Balzac.
LQ was always a labor of love supported by a handful of Lapham's friends and supporters. He was recently still coming into the office everyday at 87 and was actively editing the journal.
Lapham dropped out of Cambridge (where his advisor was CS Lewis) and went to work as a beat reporter at the SF Chronicle in the 1950s. LQ was always his dream of the the perfect magazine, and it is great that he achieved it.
The issues are evergreen. Some of my favorites are Technology, Celebrity and Swindles & Frauds.
If there is one takeaway from all the issues it is that there is nothing new under the sun.
It's called Winning Through Intimidation, and it is a very funny story of how he learned to not get burned in real estate transactions by being prepared for the inevitable tricks people would try to play on him. Short and lots of sage advice.
One of the more harrowing accounts of 1918 is the famous short story by John O'Hara called The Doctor's Son, about a teenage boy driving a country doctor around during the 1918 flu. We got off easy: https://archive.org/details/collectedstories0000ohar
"The faithful are gathered together at appointed places and times, and through performances which are always the same, they are transported into a mild state of crowd feeling sufficient to impress itself on them without becoming dangerous, and to which they grow accustomed. Their feeling of unity is dispensed to them in doses and the continuance of the church depends on the rightness of the dosage."
p. 25
Surprised the author did not mention Louis Auchincloss, who is the obvious template for the excellent Diaz book. Auchincloss was fascinated by what money did to the wealthy class of his time. The Great World and Timothy Colt, The House of Five Talents (fiction but about the Vanderbilts) and many others focus on what happens to the person who makes the money and what they ultimately leave behind.
It was common for Auchincloss to use diaries, news stories, and personal narration from people around the subject to provide perspective. The Rector of Justin has six narrators. This seems to be most useful at piercing the many layers that form around wealth, and how the individuals often lose themselves. Citizen Kane would be the film example of this.
Auchincloss was also a great short story writer. Tales of Manhattan is a great way to get into his subtle, but deeply perceptive writing about New York's old world of finance, law and art worlds.
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