A 340-year-old manual for dealing with people, and much of it is still relevant.
This is the first English edition of Baltasar Gracián’s The Courtiers Manual Oracle, or, The Art of Prudence, published in London in 1685.
Gracián was a Spanish Jesuit whose original Oráculo manual appeared in 1647: 300 short maxims about judgement, reputation, self-control, ambition and how to navigate other people without making a complete mess of things.
Some of it reads less like seventeenth-century moral philosophy than slightly ruthless modern career advice.
“Have a special care not to make ostentation of every thing, for you’ll soon come to want admirers.”
“Some new thing is to be kept in store, that we may appear with to morrow.”
And, under “Not to die the death of a Fool”:
“Some die, because they feel, and others live because they feel not.”
Even the first maxim starts with the proposition that it now takes more to make one wise man than it did seven in ancient times. Apparently everyone has always thought they were living through an unusually difficult age.
The book later acquired some formidable admirers — Schopenhauer actually translated it into German.
The binding on this copy has had a fairly hard three centuries, but somehow that seems appropriate for a book about surviving the world.
