Charles F. Haanel, 1919. Complete text.
Haanel wrote this as a correspondence course, not a book. Twenty-four parts were posted to students one week at a time from 1912, collected in print in 1916 and reprinted in 1919, and the weekly rhythm is the point: each part ends with an exercise you were expected to do for seven days before the next arrived.
The material is more structured than anything else from its decade. Haanel was a St. Louis businessman, and he writes about attention, visualisation and concentration the way a manager writes about a process — stated, demonstrated, then drilled. The exercises build in a deliberate order, from sitting still, to stilling the body, to holding an image, to holding an image with feeling.
Read it at the pace it was written for. One part a week, exercise included, is twenty-four weeks; read straight through it becomes repetitive, because the repetition was spread across half a year.
Transcribed from the Internet Sacred Text Archive edition of the 1919 printing. First published in the United States in 1916 and reprinted in 1919, before 1929, so the text is in the public domain in the United States.
Internet Sacred Text Archive, 1919 edition