Rosser Newton

The investing career runs back more than 35 years, to an analyst desk in New York and then a decade of financing privately owned energy companies before the firm existed. The history runs back further, to an undergraduate interest in a distant relative who governed Texas and then sat in the United States Senate for eighteen years.

What the two have in common is a way of reading. A covenant schedule and a county probate file both reward the person who reads the page for what it says rather than for what everyone has agreed it says. The essays on this site are mostly about that habit, applied on one side to companies in oil, gas and oilfield services, and on the other to the documents that survive from Texas after the Civil War. A longer shelf of that reading, essays on Reconstruction, Dallas and the county courthouse with reference entries behind them, is kept at rossernewtondallas.com.

Nothing here recommends a security, forecasts a price, or asks for money. The book is discussed as work, not sold.