1893
The complete text of the school reader, transcribed from the Silver, Burdett printing and re-read line by line against photographs of the original pages.
First printing · 17 November 2026
Ethics of Success
A Reader for the Higher Grades of Schools
William M. Thayer · 1893 · annotated edition
The complete 1893 text, re-read line by line against the original pages, with a note on every one of the 108 chapters and 219 of the people Thayer names identified. The only edition of this book in print.
The first printing is dated 17 November 2026. Both bindings will be sold through Amazon, so a copy reaches most addresses in a couple of days.
What is in this edition
108
An original note on every chapter, each with an epigraph drawn from outside the book, saying what it argues and flagging where Thayer may be repeating a legend.
219
Of the people Thayer names, identified at the back — including the sixteen places where he means someone other than the famous bearer of the name.
0
Silent corrections. His spellings are his and his mistakes stay as printed, flagged where they matter. Nothing of ours stands between a chapter's title and his first sentence.
The book
In 1891 William M. Thayer published Success and Its Achievers, six hundred pages on the lives of people who had made something of themselves. Teachers and superintendents asked him to turn it into a schoolbook, and the publishers handed the volume to Albert G. Boyden, who for forty-six years ran the State Normal School at Bridgewater, Massachusetts. What Boyden cut and rearranged became this reader of 1893.
Thayer wrote for children who might reasonably expect to be poor. His argument is that success is making the most of what you were given, and that a man may fail as a merchant and still succeed as a man. He proves it the only way he trusts: by example, chapter after chapter, from Franklin and Lincoln down to a Yorkshire chimney-sweep whose name survives in no other book.
The same text has appeared under several titles. Thayer published it in 1891 as Success and Its Achievers; it was abridged into this school reader in 1893; and it was reprinted in 1989 as Gaining Favor with God and Man. This edition is the 1893 reader, complete and annotated.
Why it costs what it costs
A battered original runs to about sixty dollars, and a sound one a good deal more. The facsimile reprints cost nearly as much once shipping is counted, and are photographs of somebody else's scan — tilted pages, blurred lines and all.
The text has been in the public domain for well over a century. Nobody was charging for the writing. They were charging for the scarcity.
Print carries no public-domain royalty penalty, so a properly edited edition can be sold at a fair price and still pay for the work. That is the whole argument of this press.
What we do not do
- We do not modernise an author or quietly correct him.
- We do not put our own words where they will be mistaken for his.
- We do not use AI-generated text or images anywhere in a book.
- We do not use another publisher's title or an author's name in our metadata to catch their search traffic.
In preparation
Success and Its Achievers (1891) — the illustrated original Thayer published before the schoolbook. 641 pages with some 156 plates, sold door to door by subscription agents and never through the trade. No edition of it is currently in print.