For the past 33 years, the estimable James Grant has published Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, a newsletter covering in remarkable depth, as you might possibly have guessed, Jim Grant’s observations on interest rates. If that doesn’t sound like much of a business, you don’t know niche publishing. Grant’s commands an annual subscription price of $1,170 for its fortnightly letter, which compares with a subscription to the daily, home-delivered New York Times, for those of you still hungry for sexual-harassment news, of only $488.
The Grant’s renewal rate, I’m reliably informed, is considerably higher than that of the Times. While an issue of Grant’s is only twelve pages long, it’s not a quick read. Readers don’t flip through it before tossing it on the coffee table next to last April’s issue of House Beautiful. They read it, ponder it, and, many of them, act on it by rearranging their financial affairs so as to bring them into alignment with Grant’s expensive observations. Readers come for the information and stay for the insight, all of it delivered in a pellucid style that is rare in the murky world of monetary affairs.
