author
Albert Sidney Bolles
1846–1939
A clear-eyed guide to American finance, banking, and everyday law, his books helped explain complicated systems to ordinary readers as well as students. He wrote with a practical bent, turning big economic questions into readable history and usable advice.
1 Audiobook
Putnam's Handy Law Book for the Layman
by Albert Sidney Bolles
About the author
Albert Sidney Bolles was an American writer, lawyer, and teacher whose work centered on finance, banking, economics, and commercial law. Records tied to his books and library catalogs identify him as living from 1846 to 1939, and his published work shows a long career spent explaining how money, credit, and law shaped daily life and national growth.
He is especially known for The Financial History of the United States, a major multivolume study of public finance, and for other books such as Industrial History of the United States, Practical Banking, and Putnam's Handy Law Book for the Layman. The range of those titles gives a good sense of his strengths: part historian, part legal explainer, and part teacher for general readers.
Bolles also taught commercial law and banking, including at the University of Pennsylvania, and later lectured at Haverford College. That mix of scholarship and classroom experience helps explain the tone of his writing—serious and well informed, but usually aimed at making difficult subjects feel orderly and understandable.