Of Permanent Value

Kilpatrick, a Birmingham stockbroker and former newspaperman, has been self-publishing and re-publishing this since 1992: an enormous, unauthorised, obsessively detailed chronicle of Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway, assembled from annual reports, meeting transcripts, local newspaper morgues and interviews with the people who were there. It is not an argument and barely a narrative — it is the reference work, organised by subsidiary and by episode, and it survives on the completeness of its record rather than on interpretation. Each edition adds the previous year and revises the rest, which is why the page count keeps climbing.

Why it’s on the list: Li Lu’s value-investing section is the one the saved posts actually photographed, and it is built around primary and near-primary material rather than technique books — Graham, Munger, Buffett’s own record. Kilpatrick is the archive of the Berkshire case: not a lesson drawn from it but the evidence it would be drawn from.

Where I saw it: On Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, the 137-entry Himalaya Capital bibliography, in the section on Value Investing, Finance, and Capitalism — the one section Kyle’s two saved X posts did photograph. The full list came from the source PDF.

Connections

• Warren Buffett — the subject, in more detail than any other book on him attempts.
• Berkshire Hathaway — organised subsidiary by subsidiary; the value of the book is as a reference on the holdings.
• Value Investing — the case study the whole discipline keeps citing.
• Li Lu · Himalaya Capital — the curator and the bibliography; Li Lu manages money for Charlie Munger’s family.