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SEABURY STANTON : 1918 ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT WORLD WAR I OFFICER TRAINING JOURNAL HANDWRITTEN BY THE LONG TIME FRIEND OF WARREN BUFFET AND DIRECTOR OF BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY WHO WOULD LATER PROVE BUFFET WRONG

8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. On offer is a very interesting manuscript relic of WWI with a unique connection and association to American investor of renown Warren Buffet and his company Berkshire Hathaway being a handwritten notebook on trench warfare compiled by Seabury Stanton in March and April of 1918. Seabury Stanton would later be a Director of Berkshire Hathaway until he was fired by Warren Buffet during a confrontation over the tender offer price of the company's stock which resulted in taking over Berkshire Hathaway in 1964. Seabury Stanton figures prominently in the history of the Berkshire Hathaway Company and was a 50 year employee of the company when he left the company in 1964. Accounts vary as to whether he was fired or quit but he had been the director when Buffet gained controlling interest and was forced out during the takeover. This is Seabury Stanton's original handwritten notebook from his officer training during the First World War. This notebook has about 85 pages copiously inscribed with handwritten notes concerning all aspects of trench warfare in 1918 including Poison Gas, Machine Guns, Construction of Trenches and Warfare of Position, Grenades, Raids and Patrols and more. The notebook includes a few drawings interspersed within the handwritten text. About half the pages are left blank. Stanton noted the name of the instructor and the date for each of about a dozen lessons with each lesson being several pages of handwritten notes. The first page is inscribed Seabury Stanton 1st Inf. Co. O.T.C. BIO NOTES: One online source provides: Berkshire Hathaway traces its roots to a textile manufacturing company established by Oliver Chace in 1839 as the Valley Falls Company in Valley Falls, Rhode Island. Chace had previously worked for Samuel Slater, the founder of the first successful textile mill in America. Chace founded his first textile mill in 1806. In 1929 the Valley Falls Company merged with the Berkshire Cotton Manufacturing Company established in 1889, in Adams, Massachusetts. The combined company was known as Berkshire Fine Spinning Associates. In 1955 Berkshire Fine Spinning Associates merged with the Hathaway Manufacturing Company which was founded in 1888 in New Bedford, Massachusetts by Horatio Hathaway. Hathaway was successful in its first decades, but it suffered during a general decline in the textile industry after World War I. At this time, Hathaway was run by Seabury Stanton, whose investment efforts were rewarded with renewed profitability after the Depression. After the merger Berkshire Hathaway had 15 plants employing over 12,000 workers with over $120 million in revenue and was headquartered in New Bedford, Massachusetts. However, seven of those locations were closed by the end of the decade, accompanied by large layoffs. In 1962, Warren Buffett began buying stock in Berkshire Hathaway after noticing a pattern in the price direction of its stock whenever the company closed a mill. Eventually, Buffett acknowledged that the textile business was waning and company's financial situation was not going to improve. In 1964, Stanton made a verbal tender offer of $111?2 per share for the company to buy back Buffett's shares. Buffett agreed to the deal. A few weeks later, Buffett received the tender offer in writing, but the tender offer was for only $113?8. Buffett later admitted that this lower, undercutting offer made him angry. Instead of selling at the slightly lower price, Buffett decided to buy more of the stock to take control of the company and fire Stanton (which he did). However, this put Buffett in situation where he was now majority owner of a textile business that was failing. In 2010, Buffett claimed that purchasing Berkshire Hathaway was the biggest investment mistake he had ever made, and claimed that it had denied him compounded investment returns of about $200 billion over the previous 45 years. Buffett claimed that had he invested that money directly in insurance businesses instead of buying out Berkshire Hathaway (due to what he perceived as a slight by an individual), those investments would have paid off several hundredfold. Buffett initially maintained Berkshire's core business of textiles, but by 1967, he was expanding into the insurance industry and other investments. Berkshire first ventured into the insurance business with the purchase of National Indemnity Company. In the late 1970s, Berkshire acquired an equity stake in the Government Employees Insurance Company (GEICO), which forms the core of its insurance operations today (and is a major source of capital for Berkshire Hathaway's other investments). In 1985, the last textile operations (Hathaway's historic core) were shut down. Overall G+.. Book Condition: Good

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