Birth of the Law Book Trade

M. H. Hoeflich

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511761287.005

2 - Birth of the Law Book Trade

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010

M. H. Hoeflich

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M. H. Hoeflich: Affiliation:
University of Kansas

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Summary

GENERAL BOOKSELLERS

From early in the colonial period, there were both lawyers and law books in North America. By the eighteenth century, the average American bookseller almost always carried among its general stock some law books. Of course, these were mainly books on English common law. We know from both catalogues of lawyers' libraries and booksellers' advertisements that it was far from impossible for an eighteenth-century lawyer to amass a good working law library in the major urban centers. Thomas Jefferson's library was one such in Virginia. Edwin Wolf, in his The Book Culture of a Colonial American City, has shown that eighteenth-century Philadelphia had an active, if somewhat small, law book trade.

For the most part, our information about the size and scope of the law book trade in the period before the Revolution comes from newspaper advertisements and, in some cases, separately printed catalogues. These reveal that as the eighteenth century progressed, the number of law books being sold became significant. James White, who carried on a printing and bookselling business in Boston from 1778 until 1801, published a listing of law books he had for sale in the Independent Chronicle and Advertiser of 11 July 1799, a newspaper he published in 1799 and 1800. He listed eighty-two titles for sale. The vast majority of these were English reports and treatises, including two editions of Blackstone's Commentaries.

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Type: Chapter
Information: Legal Publishing in Antebellum America , pp. 30 - 73

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511761287.005 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2010

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