The Roth Memory Course
TL;DR — The 1918 correspondence course that taught a generation of American businessmen to memorise — now public domain, and still the clearest version of the method.
⬇ Download the archived copy — kept here so the document survives its source going dark. Public domain by age (pre-1929).
Seven lessons, 344 pages, 1918. A correspondence course in memory technique, sold to businessmen on the promise that recalling names and figures on demand was a competitive advantage.
The methods are the classical ones — association chains, a phonetic number system, the loci technique — but Roth’s presentation is unusually concrete and drill-heavy compared to modern treatments, which tend to describe the techniques without making you practise them.
Public domain, which is the other half of why it circulates: there is no reason to buy a modern book that reorganises this material when the original is free and better drilled.
Where this came from
344 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.