A Timeless Classic

In my long career as an agricultural economist, one of the things that I take most pride in may surprise you. I am holding it on the left in this picture. It is the hardcover version of the classic book Economics of Futures Trading by Tom Hieronymus that my little publishing company Ceres Books republished in late 2022. It is more complicated than you might think to republish an older book like this when all you have to work with is a scanned pdf copy of the original. The source of that scanned copy is on the right in the picture, which is my own, very dog-eared, original copy of the 1977 edition of Economics of Futures Trading. I could not be happier that the new hardcover edition on the left is so close to the look and feel of the original on the right. I think Tom would be pleased.

So, you might be asking why is this such a big deal to me. The answer is pretty simple. This timeless classic is still the best book ever written about commodity futures markets and it would have been a terrible intellectual loss if it disappeared into the mists of time, which was what was happening before I decided to republish it. Only a few copies were still in circulation and available from rare book sites for an extremely high price. If you want to read more about why I think this is the best book ever written on commodity futures markets, see this earlier blog post. I also talked in the post about the huge impact the book, and Tom himself, had on my professional journey.

I am super excited to share that this beautiful new hardcover edition of “Economics of Futures Trading” is now available from Ingram Spark for only $21.99 plus shipping at this link. If you prefer to purchase through Amazon, the hardcover edition is available for the still quite reasonable price of $29.99 here. Complete details about the book and the availability of the paperback and ebook versions can be found on this page at my personal website. If you are looking for something to proudly display on your bookshelves, I highly recommend the new hardcover edition.

Last but not least, it is interesting to consider how much the real inflation-adjusted price of the book has fallen. The $21.99 price at Ingram Spark today is only $4.40 in 1977 dollars. The original list price for my 1977 edition was $16.95. I like to think that Tom might even smile a bit if he knew the real price of his book had fallen so much. He would be the first to acknowledge that the real price of anything in the commodity world tends to decline over time.

 

Browse other posts by category: