Books on Money

1. The House of Mirth
By Edith Wharton
Scribner's, 1905

Suze Orman could have saved Lily Bart. Alas, poor Lily: The heroine of Edith Wharton's "House of Mirth" was born a century too early for CNBC. In the novel, Lily's parents, failed speculators, have lost everything, save their daughter's stunning beauty. To survive as a lady of fashion, Lily needs to monetize that singularly illiquid asset. If she would make marriage her "vocation," she must "calculate and contrive, and retreat and advance" with ruthless capitalist discipline. But Lily, a gambler by nature, prefers the stock market to the marriage market. She soon discovers that men's Wall Street whispers are little more reliable than women's bridge-table gossip. "Money stands for all kinds of things," Lily tells the only suitor worthy of her hand. For this hard-won knowledge she pays a queen's ransom, a treasure measured out in dollars, in reputation, in her very life.

2. Money 332.49 G
By John Kenneth Galbraith
Houghton Mifflin, 1975

Those who "talk money and teach about it," John Kenneth Galbraith says in this history of currency in America, often cultivate the "belief that they are in privileged association with the occult -- that they have insights that are nowise available to the ordinary person . . . this is a well-established fraud." Peppering his plain-spoken account with tart opinion and ready wit, Galbraith begins in the colonial era, when shells, tobacco, and pelts served as currency, and moves apace to a modern nation where money is made out of . . . money. During the Great Depression, when money disappeared, the most effective remedies were daring, flexible, pragmatic and compassionate. Full of the grainy particulars of history and the god's-eye grandeur of economics, "Money" boasts equal parts empathy and majesty.

3. Money and Magic
By Hans Christoph Binswanger
University of Chicago, 1994

ISBN: 9780226051857

A large and startling theory spills out of this offbeat little volume: Modern money systems have deep roots in alchemy, the Renaissance science of turning base metals into gold. For evidence, Hans Christoph Binswanger, a Swiss economist, turns to literature: the second and less well-known part of Goethe's "Faust," published in 1832. Faust, the alchemist, and Mephistopheles, his diabolic helpmeet, again wager Faust's soul, this time on the creation of money, which they intend to use to save the debt-ridden emperor. The adventurers fashion notes from worthless paper and bold promises and then "materialize" their airy currency by buying land. The transmutation of paper into money and then into property stirs within Faust an ecstatic vision of limitless growth. But Binswanger argues that the ecstasy masks a lurking agony: In a world of boundless, alchemical paper, when is enough, enough?

4. Boggs 332.4 W
By Lawrence Weschler
University of Chicago, 1999

Lawrence Weschler plunges headlong into the world of the conceptual artist J.S.G. Boggs with this dizzying, dazzling portrait. Born in New Jersey in 1955, Boggs lived, at the time of Weschler's writing, in London, where the Bank of England had accused him of counterfeiting (he was acquitted). The complaint made some sense: Boggs draws paper currency so accurately that his bills might enter the marketplace undetected. But he doesn't quietly pass them off; he spends them at face value, after providing a full explanation, with any shopkeeper who will agree to play along. Many do. Weschler chased the money artist across Europe and through the looking glass of value, taking detours into history, law, economics and philosophy. Big questions arise on the nature of art and money. What makes a dollar a dollar? Reader, check your wallet.

5. A Nation of Counterfeiters 332.1097 M
By Stephen Mihm
Harvard, 2007

Between the Revolutionary era, when the Continental was America's currency, and the Civil War, which brought us the greenback, the U.S. had no national paper currency. Chartered banks and their privately issued notes proliferated. The babel of competing bills created fertile ground for counterfeits, which sprang up like mushrooms. By the 1850s, thousands of different breeds of paper passed as American money. In "A Nation of Counterfeiters," Stephen Mihm's relentless sleuthing and lively prose reanimate a world in which every dollar had to be carefully read. This rogues gallery of forgers, coin-shavers and engravers-gone-bad holds up a funhouse mirror to the entrepreneurial face of American money-making.

Ms. Kamensky, a history professor at Brandeis University, is the author of "The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America's First Banking Collapse" (Viking, 2008).