A Book About You by Charles Haanel: A Reader's Guide

A Book About You is one of the later books by Charles Haanel, published when he was about sixty. It sits in an odd spot on his shelf. It is far less read than The Master Key System or Mental Chemistry, its date is given differently from one source to the next, and parts of it are reported to circulate inside modern editions of the Master Key course as "lost" chapters. This guide sorts out what the records say.

A note on sources: we could not obtain a full public domain text of the book, so this page does not quote it. It rests on copyright and library records, the contents listed for a modern edition, and comparison with Haanel's other writing. Where that leaves a question open, we say so.

When was it published?

Reference sources disagree. Some give 1927 and some give 1928, and the encyclopedia article on Haanel uses both in different places. The records explain why.

The book first appeared in 1927 under the one-word title You. The Catalog of Copyright Entries for 1927, published by the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress, lists You by Charles F. Haanel, published in St. Louis by Haanel himself, 336 pages including a portrait, with the note "Cover-title: A book about you." It records a copyright date of March 5, 1927. So from the start, the title page said You while the cover said A Book About You.

The following year the cover title became the main title. The 1928 Catalog of Copyright Entries lists A Book About You by Charles F. Haanel, published in New York by The Master Key Institute, with a copyright date of June 15, 1928. Its notes add three details: the cover is lettered "How to develop personal magnetism," the book was "Published in 1927 under title: You," and the copy is marked "Fifth printing, January, 1928." The Library of Congress catalog record for this edition, as reproduced in Open Library, carries the same notes and gives a length of 284 pages.

The careful answer, then, is that the book was first published in 1927 as You, with "A Book About You" on its cover, and reissued in 1928 under the title A Book About You. A source that gives only 1928 is dating the retitled edition. The "fifth printing" note also suggests the book was reprinted several times within its first year, although the records do not say how many copies were made.

What the book covers

Without the full text in hand, we can describe the book only from its outline. An audiobook edition published under the title You lists an introduction followed by sixteen chapters:

1. Planetary Vibrations
2. Solar Vibrations
3. Mental Vibrations
4. Electrical Vibrations
5. Celestial Vibrations
6. Cosmic Vibrations
7. Light Vibrations
8. Sound Vibrations
9. Color Vibrations
10. Heat Vibrations
11. Periodicity
12. The Source of Life
13. The Emotions
14. Magnetism
15. The Imagination
16. Destiny

Ten of the sixteen chapters deal with vibration of one kind or another. The later chapters turn to cycles, the source of life, the emotions, magnetism, imagination and destiny. The 1928 cover line, "How to develop personal magnetism," suggests that Haanel or his publisher saw magnetism as the book's selling point. One modern publisher's description goes further and presents the book as close to a treatise on astrology. With planetary, solar and celestial chapters in the outline, that is plausible, but we have not been able to check it against the text itself.

How it relates to The Master Key System

The two works share an author and a worldview, but they were made for different purposes. The Master Key course began around 1912 as a correspondence course: 24 weekly parts, each with numbered paragraphs, an exercise and study questions. A Book About You came about fifteen years later. The copyright records describe it as an ordinary book, and its outline shows chapters on topics rather than a weekly course of lessons.

The themes connect. Vibration already plays a part in the course. Part Four describes thought as carried by the law of vibration, and Part Twenty-Two explains health in terms of rates of vibration. Part Three describes a "magnetic" person as one who radiates energy from the solar plexus. A Book About You appears to take these threads and give them whole chapters. The course's central picture of a Universal Mind acting through individual thought, and of a law of attraction by which like draws like, is the background against which the later book is best read.

It also belongs with Haanel's other books of the 1920s. Mental Chemistry (1922) and The New Psychology (1924) each restate ideas from the course in essay form. The 1928 copyright catalog lists editions of both The New Psychology and A Book About You under the name The Master Key Institute in New York, entered a day apart. That suggests Haanel was by then presenting his later books as a family built around the course.

The "Parts 25 to 28" in modern editions

Many readers meet this book without knowing it. Some modern editions of the Master Key course run to 28 parts instead of 24, and some advertise the extra four as lost or recovered chapters. The Wikipedia article on Haanel states that these chapters are not original and were copied from chapters 11 to 14 of A Book About You, and booksellers' descriptions of several editions say the same. Among the variant editions that article lists are a "28 Part Complete Deluxe Edition" published in 2007 and Master Key Arcana (2004), which it describes as using the 28-chapter version.

We could not compare those editions line by line with an original copy of A Book About You, so we cannot confirm exactly which chapters were used or whether they were edited. Two things are clear from the records. First, the course as Haanel issued it had 24 parts: the 1919 St. Louis edition is titled The Master Key System in Twenty-Four Parts with Questionnaire and Glossary. Second, any chapters taken from A Book About You date from 1927 at the earliest, some fifteen years after the course began. If the report is right, they are genuine Haanel, but they were never part of the course and were not lost from it.

To check your own copy, look at the table of contents. An edition that ends at Part Twenty-Four, followed by the questionnaire and glossary, matches the 1919 book; one that runs to Part Twenty-Eight has added later material. Our part-by-part guide covers all 24 parts of the original.

Its limits

• Belief, not science. The outline promises accounts of planetary, solar, cosmic and mental vibration and their effects on a person. Whatever the details, these are statements of New Thought belief and the popular science of the 1920s, not findings of physics, astronomy or psychology.
• Two titles, many reprints. Catalog records list modern reprints under both You and A Book About You, with page counts that vary widely. The 1927 and 1928 printings themselves differ in length, 336 pages against 284. Readers should check which text they are holding.
• A thin record. Apart from copyright and library records, we found little written about the book, and no contemporary reviews.
• Sales language. The "personal magnetism" cover line and the "lost chapters" label on modern editions are marketing, not descriptions of content.

Where to find it

Because it was first published in the United States in 1927, the book is now in the public domain there: works published in that year entered the public domain on January 1, 2023. Haanel died in 1949, so his text is also out of copyright in countries that protect works for the author's life plus 70 years. Introductions and edits added by later publishers are a separate matter.

At the time of writing, the HathiTrust Digital Library catalog lists a full-view scan of the 1927 St. Louis printing of You, from a University of Illinois library copy. We were not able to retrieve its text for this guide. Readers who want Haanel's original wording should start there, or with a library copy, rather than with an undated reprint.

Should you read it?

Start with the Master Key course, one part a week, then Mental Chemistry. A Book About You is best saved for later and read as a historical document: a record of how a New Thought writer of the late 1920s tried to explain personality and fate through vibration and magnetism.