There are few areas of legal bibliography which have attracted so little attention as books of entries. The reason, no doubt, is that given by Winfield: in his opinion, ‘There is no duller reading in the whole range of our law.’ They do, nevertheless, have a story which ought to be told a little more fully, especially since the previous accounts take no notice of manuscripts. And, so far as this series of lectures is concerned, it is a happy circumstance that the last edition of a book of entries (strictly so called) was printed in Dublin in 1792. It was an updated version of Lilly's Collection of Modern Entries, which began life in London in 1723.

A book of entries may be defined as a collection of precedents of pleading copied from the rolls on which pleadings were formally entered. It should be distinguished from two other kinds of precedents of pleading, of which something ought to be said first. The first precedents of pleading to appear, long before the age of print, were called Narrationes, meaning ‘counts’ or (in English) ‘tales’ – and there is evidence that the English word was used in medieval times. These tales were the opening pleadings recited by plaintiffs, in the days of oral pleading. A great many manuscript books of specimens survive, and there are some Tudor printed versions known as Novae Narrationes, though it seems unlikely that the adjective was significant; the title was used by the Selden Society for a general edition in 1960.