Friday Fun: Our Latest Acquisition

We just acquired a little gem of nineteenth-century law book advertising: an 8-page brochure from the Edward Thompson Company, extolling the virtues of the American and English Encyclopaedia of Law (1887-96). The publishers called their Encyclopaedia "The Most Wonderful Law Book of the XIX Century," and asserted "If all other Law Books should be destroyed, the world would have lost but little of its legal information."

I thought this was a lot of hyperbole for an encyclopedia I'd never heard of. But lo and behold, 135 libraries in WorldCat still own it, it is available electronically through the Internet Archive and Law Library Microform Consortium, and it went into a second edition in the first decade of the twentieth century.

I may not have spent a lot of time reading the Edward Thompson Company's law books, but I sure am a fan of their ads. Besides this one, we own the sheet music for a "Pleading and Practice Grand March" commissioned by the publishers to commemorate its Encyclopedia of Pleading and Practice.

You can view the rest of this ad brochure at our flickr site.