A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, also known as Plain Truths in a Homespun Dress,[1] is an 1802 autobiographical book written by American businessman Timothy Dexter.

Dexter was a rich businessman and eccentric, known for gaining his wealth through lucky investments like sending coals to Newcastle at the time of a miners' strike.

[1] Dexter began selling bed warmers to the West Indies, a move that proved to be a good idea when the captain sold them as ladles in molasses production.

Nineteenth-century poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote in The Atlantic in 1890, "I am afraid that Mr. Emerson and Mr. Whitman must yield the claim of declaring American literary independence to Lord Timothy Dexter, who not only taught his countrymen that they need not go to the Heralds' College to authenticate their titles of nobility, but also that they were at perfect liberty to spell just as they liked, and to write without troubling themselves about stops of any kind.

The author drew a comparison to Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack and detailed its usefulness in teaching typing, writing "for the student cannot allow his eyes to stray from the text to the keys and make a successful copy.