Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
The original book on market manias. Mackay's chronicle of the Dutch Tulip Mania, the South Sea Bubble, and the Mississippi Scheme remains the most vivid account of how collective delusion drives markets to extremes. Victorian prose, but the human dynamics are identical to every modern bubble from dot-com to crypto. The specific technology changes; the madness never does.
Tulip mania as Mackay tells it mostly did not happen: the Dutch economy never collapsed, ruined fortunes are hard to find in the records, and his sources were moralizing pamphlets. The three financial chapters everyone quotes are a sliver of a long Victorian miscellany on alchemists, witch trials, and haunted houses. As market history, this is folklore with excellent anecdotes.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
