Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is the book people quote whenever a market goes wild, from dot-com stocks to crypto. It is also free: the text is in the public domain in the USA, and Project Gutenberg offers the illustrated 1852 edition with no signup. Below: where to get the free copy, what is actually inside (it is not only about money), a plain-English summary of the three famous money manias with the exact lines from the book, six lessons for investors today, and four more free classics to read next.
On 29 October 2026 we opened the Project Gutenberg page for the book (#24518), confirmed it is marked "Public domain in the USA", that it lists the 1852 two-volume edition and that the EPUB and Kindle files are offered, and searched the Gutenberg plain text to check every quote, price and date below. We also opened the Gutenberg page of each "read next" book. We link only to those sources, never to unofficial PDF copies.
Yes. Charles Mackay (1814-1889) first published the book in London in 1841 as Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions. The free copy on Project Gutenberg is the 1852 edition, retitled Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds and printed by the Office of the National Illustrated Library, 227 Strand. Gutenberg marks it "Public domain in the USA" and lets you download it without an account.
Modern reprints are a different matter. Paperbacks with a new foreword, notes or a modern abridgement can be copyrighted for those new parts, so a PDF of a recent edition on a random site is not a legal copy. Outside the USA, copyright terms differ, but Mackay died in 1889, so the original text is out of copyright in most countries that use life plus 70 years. Check your local rules if unsure.
Project Gutenberg has no PDF for this book, but it has better options:
EPUB (with images) for phones, tablets, Apple Books and most e-readers; Kindle (with images) to send to a Kindle; and the HTML version to read in a browser, which keeps the 1852 engravings such as "The Bubblers' Arms" and the Rue de Quincampoix. If you really need a PDF, open the HTML version and use your browser's Print > Save as PDF.
It is a long book, so do not start at page one unless you want everything. Read the first three chapters (the money manias, about a fifth of the book) and dip into the rest later.
Mackay's aim, in his own words from the preface: "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." He collects crowd follies from history, and only the first three chapters are about markets.
| Part | Chapters | Why read it |
|---|---|---|
| Money manias | The Mississippi Scheme, The South-Sea Bubble, The Tulipomania | The famous part: three speculative bubbles in France, England and Holland |
| Get-rich-quick beliefs | The Alchymists | Centuries of people chasing the philosopher's stone, and the fraudsters who sold the dream |
| Predicting the future | Modern Prophecies, Fortune-telling | Why confident forecasts keep finding believers |
| Fads and panics | The Magnetisers, the hair and beard chapter, Haunted Houses, Popular Follies of Great Cities | Short, often funny social history |
| Mass hysteria | The Crusades, The Witch Mania, The Slow Poisoners | The darkest chapters: crowds that turned violent. Note: these chapters (The Crusades, The Witch Mania) use 1841 period language about persecution. |
| Odds and ends | Popular admiration of great thieves, duels and ordeals, relics | Lighter essays in volume II |
John Law, a Scottish financier, persuaded the French regent to let him set up a bank in 1716 whose notes could pay taxes, and then the Mississippi Company, which was meant to profit from France's Louisiana territory. Shares were issued at five hundred livres each and Paris went wild buying them.
Mackay describes the trading street, the Rue de Quincampoix, so crowded that a hunchbacked man "gained considerable sums by lending his hump as a writing-desk to the eager speculators". One servant, sent to sell 250 shares at 8,000 livres, found the price had risen to 10,000, kept the 500,000-livre difference and "set out the same evening for another country."
When people tried to swap paper for gold and silver, the government limited how much coin anyone could hold, confidence collapsed, and Law fled France. He died in Venice. The lesson Mackay draws: paper wealth printed faster than real value is created cannot last.
The South Sea Company offered to take over Britain's national debt in return for trading rights in South America. When Parliament debated the plan, the stock "which had been at a hundred and thirty the previous day, gradually rose to three hundred", and by the beginning of August 1720 it "finally rose to one thousand per cent."
The rise spawned hundreds of copycat companies, nicknamed "Bubbles". Mackay's most famous example is a prospectus for "A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is". Its promoter opened an office in Cornhill, took deposits on a thousand shares in five hours, was "the winner of 2000l.", and "set off the same evening for the Continent. He was never heard of again."
The stock collapsed in the autumn of 1720, ruining thousands, and Parliament investigated the directors. Read it next to any modern listing of a company with no product and a great story.
Rare tulip bulbs became a status symbol in the Dutch Republic, then a speculation. Mackay says that in 1635 some buyers paid 100,000 florins for forty roots, and that a Semper Augustus "was thought to be very cheap at 5500 florins". He reprints a list of goods said to have been given for one Viceroy bulb, worth 2,500 florins in total: wheat, rye, four fat oxen, eight fat swine, twelve fat sheep, wine, beer, butter, a thousand pounds of cheese, a bed, a suit of clothes and a silver drinking-cup.
By 1636, regular tulip markets ran in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Haarlem, Leiden and other towns, and "even chimney-sweeps and old clothes-women, dabbled in tulips." Then "the more prudent began to see that this folly could not last for ever", prices fell "and never rose again", and Mackay reports that tulips once worth six thousand florins could be had for five hundred.
A fair warning: modern historians, notably Anne Goldgar in Tulipmania (2007), argue that Mackay exaggerated the scale of the tulip crash, which hit a fairly small circle of traders. Treat his tulip chapter as a vivid morality tale built on older pamphlets, not as precise economic data.
1. Crowds move together, and recover one by one. If everyone around you is buying the same thing for the same reason, that is information about the crowd, not about the asset.
2. "[E]very body gained" at first. Mackay notes that in every mania confidence is highest at the start, when early buyers really do make money. Early profits are what pull the rest of the crowd in.
3. Ask what produces the return. The "nobody to know what it is" company promised £100 a year on a £2 deposit with no explanation. Any modern pitch that cannot explain where the profit comes from belongs in the same box.
4. Buying only to resell is a warning sign. Tulip prices broke when "rich people no longer bought the flowers to keep them in their gardens, but to sell them again".
5. Leverage and paper promises turn a fall into ruin. Promises to deliver bulbs later (what modern historians describe as tulip futures contracts) and Law's paper notes meant that when prices fell, debts remained.
6. Be wary of the clean story. As the tulip debate shows, even this book simplifies. Check the numbers behind any tale of easy riches, including the old ones.
Day 1: the preface and the three money chapters (Mississippi, South Sea, Tulips). Day 2: The Alchymists and Fortune-telling, which explain why people keep believing in sure-fire formulas. Keep the HTML edition open for the engravings; the 1720 playing cards and caricatures make the South Sea chapter come alive.
If you finish and want the trader's view of crowd psychology, go straight to Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, or read our Reminiscences summary first.
Charles Mackay · 1841
Why read it: The classic itself: three famous bubbles and a tour of crowd follies, free in the illustrated 1852 edition.
Edwin Lefèvre · 1923
Why read it: Edwin Lefèvre's 1923 trading memoir: what crowd psychology looks like from inside the market.
Henry Howard Harper · 1926
Why read it: Henry Howard Harper (1926) on why speculators repeat the same mistakes Mackay describes.
Thomas Gibson · 1907
Why read it: Thomas Gibson (1907) on booms and busts as a repeating pattern, written for investors.
Walter Bagehot · 1873
Why read it: Walter Bagehot (1873) on credit, banks and panics: the plumbing behind every mania.
More on this topic: Classics shelf.
Yes. The text is in the public domain in the USA, and Project Gutenberg (#24518) offers the 1852 two-volume edition free as EPUB, Kindle, HTML and plain text, with no signup. Outside the USA, check your local copyright rules.
Project Gutenberg does not offer a PDF, but you can open its HTML version and use your browser's Print > Save as PDF. Avoid PDFs of modern reprints on random sites: their new forewords and notes can be copyrighted.
It is Charles Mackay's history of crowd follies. The first three chapters cover the Mississippi Scheme, the South Sea Bubble and Tulip Mania; the rest covers alchemy, prophecies, fortune-telling, fads, the Crusades and witch hunts.
Charles Mackay, in the preface: "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
Only partly. Modern historians such as Anne Goldgar argue that he exaggerated how widespread the tulip crash was. The South Sea and Mississippi chapters rest on better-documented events, but read all three as lively history, not precise data.
About 280,000 words in two volumes. The three money chapters are roughly a fifth of the book and can be read in a day.
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General information only. Public-domain status is for the USA, so check your own country. We never host files; every link goes to the official source.