Daniel Defoe’s condemnation in 1719 of the broking community as “a trade founded in fraud” is among hundreds of rare volumes to be sold in the largest private collection of books on financial speculation to have come on to the market.

More than 750 first-edition books and pamphlets – including the first jobber’s sheet of 1698 – form a unique collection that spans the history of the stock and commodity markets in London, Europe and Wall Street between the 17th and 20th centuries.

It reflects the passion of an individual who has searched for specific titles from sources worldwide. Christopher Dennistoun, a stock speculator and general bookseller, said: “I have been putting this collection together for about 30 years, and I am still as thrilled now by the hunt and discovery of a book as I was on that first day.

“Building it has been like piecing together a wonderful, enormous jigsaw. I hope it is a worthy addition for any library and that, in some way, it will augment our understanding of the history and culture of speculation.”

He is selling it next month for £395,000 – through Bernard J Shapero Rare Books, a leading antiquarian dealer in London – because he ran out of space to keep it. “I was driving myself and my family mad,” he said. “I couldn’t show the books properly. There were too many of them. I love the material and it’s very hard to part with, but it’s also an enormous relief.”

By the late 17th century, London coffee houses had become the pivotal sources and dissemination points of political, economic and financial news. Individual houses came to be associated with a particular clientele or profession.

The earliest item in Mr Dennistoun’s collection is a rare broker’s sheet issued by John Castaing “at his Office at Jonathan’s Coffeehouse” on May 3, 1698. Castaing’s publication was the first in an unbroken chain of published share prices and the earliest evidence of organised trading in marketable securities in London.

Defoe’s The Anatomy of Exchange-Alley was published a year before the first great stock market crash took place in 1720 in England, France and, to a lesser degree, the Netherlands. In this volume Defoe detailed alleged stock market manipulations and sham reports generated to push up stock prices to the advantage of the perpetrators.

He wrote: “ ’Tis a compleat system of knavery; that ’tis a trade founded in fraud, born of deceit, and nourished by trick, cheat, wheedle, forgeries, falsehoods, and all sorts of delusions.”

Asked what Defoe might have thought about the trade today, Mr Dennistoun said: “What he said about jobbers is just as true today as it was 300 years ago. They’re taking enormous spreads. They buy for 58 and sell for 64.”

When the bubble burst in 1720, thousands faced financial ruin. Sir Isaac Newton, who lost a fortune at the time, wrote: “I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.”

The Dutch The Great Mirror of Folly of 1720 satirised the mania for speculation, and this collection boasts a magnificent copy with a series of fascinating copper engravings. Its frontispiece says that the publication includes “prints, comedies and poems published by various amateurs, scoffing at this terrible and deceitful trade”. Other first editions in the collection include Thomas Mortimer’s Every Man His Own Broker: or, a Guide to the Stock-Exchange of 1791, which tells the common man of the dangers of speculation, and Charles Mackay’s Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds of 1841, which cites as examples the South Sea Bubble and the Dutch Tulipomania of the mid-17th century.

A masterful overview of the methods, erratic swings and language of Wall Street is James K. Medbury’s Men and Mysteries of Wall Streetof 1870. However, the most authoritative account of the robber baron era during the last half of the 19th century must be the immense tome Fifty Years in Wall Street, written in 1908 by Henry Clews, a financial adviser to President Grant.

Such is Mr Dennistoun’s passion for the books that he talks of wanting to go on adding to the collection – “even after it is gracing somebody else’s library”. The collection will be exhibited at Bernard J Shapero Rare Books, 32 St George St W1, from May 15-28 in a show titled Bubbles, Busts and Booms.

Age-old story

“The accounts of the Mississippi scheme and the South Sea bubble, showing the ridiculous lengths to which an inordinate appetite for gain will hurry entire nations, may be beneficial at this time, when there is a proneness to the same species of epidemy” – Review of Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, by Charles Mackay

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