title: The History of Money
author:  Jack Weatherford 
description: Weatherford brings a cultural anthropologist's wide-angled perspective to this illuminating investigation of money's role in shaping human affairs. He identifies three great mutations in the story of money. The first began with the invention of coins in the Anatolian kingdom of Lydia 3000 years ago, sparking a monetary revolution that underpinned classical Greek and Roman civilizations. Next, family-owned, credit-giving banks of Renaissance Italy ushered in the modern world capitalist system, which swept away feudalism and abetted the expansion of European hegemony to the Americas. In the third major transition, predicts Weatherford (Savages and Civilization), the current age of paper money will give way to an era of cybermoney, or electronic cash, in which transactions are conducted via the Internet and by other forms of electronic transfer. Full of forgotten lore and provocative opinions (e.g., harmful inflation is identified as the dominant monetary theme of our century), and sprinkled with allusions to Voltaire, Goethe, L. Frank Baum and Gertrude Stein, this intriguing selective survey will captivate even readers with no particular yen for financial knowledge. <br />Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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  A Duke Stripped Bare
  
  
  by Felicia Greene
  
  They had forgotten to carry the three. Catherine Wentford, surrounded by
  stacks of messily scrawled papers, shook her head quietly as she arranged the
  accounts of the Cappadene Club into clear, if hasty, order.
  
  Outside the firmly-shut door of the candlelit study, a lush array of feminine
  giggles and masculine grunts suggested the occupants of the other rooms were
  not, under any circumstances, focused on mathematics.
  
  Catherine knew she needed to be hasty. A lady of her position shouldn’t be
  worrying herself with mathematics, and she certainly shouldn’t be doing
  mathematics for money. She could already imagine the ton’s questions--why did
  the Wentfords need money, what on earth could have happened to them, sending
  their only daughter into something that smacked horribly of trade…
  
  And as for why she was doing mathematics in a notorious brothel?
  
  ‘Oh, Lord.’ Catherine murmured quietly to herself as she herded another few
  rec