Preserved Fish, and other rich Fuggers
I started reading Terry Pratchett's A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Non-Fiction recently. Halfway through it, I think I can say it's like his Discworld novels: a bit of a mixed bag at times, but when it's good and when it's funny, then it's really good and really funny. I'd recommend picking it up.
An interesting tidbit that also appears in this article in the Grauniad:
Undirected research goes on all the time, of course. There's no research like the research you're doing when you think you're just enjoying yourself. In Hay-on-Wye, under the very noses of other authors, I picked up that not-very-famous work The Cyclopedia of Commercial and Business ANECDOTES; comprising INTERESTING REMINISCENCES AND FACTS, Remarkable Traits and Humors... (and so on, for 64 words). There are obvious nuggets on almost every page (for instance, that Preserved Fish was a famous New York financier). Then there is what I might call secondary discovery, as in, for example, the dark delight of the Victorian author, when writing about a famous German family of financiers, in coming up with sentences such as "soon there were rich Fuggers throughout Lower Saxony". And finally there was the building up of some insight into the minds of people for whom money was not the means to an end, or even the means to more money, but what the sea is for fishes.
Wikipedia has an article on Preserved Fish. And on those other rich Fuggers, of course.