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Book Review
Michael H. Hoeflich and Karen S. Beck, Catalogues of Early American Law Libraries: The 1846 Auction Catalogue of Joseph Story's Library, Austin, Texas: Jamail Center for Legal Research, 2004. Pp. vi + 74. $40.00 (ISBN 0-935630-58-9).
Michael H. Hoeflich, Louis V. de la Vergne, and Kjell Å. Modéer, Catalogues of Early American Law Libraries: The 1877 Sale Catalogue of Gustavus Schmidt's Library, Austin, Texas: Jamail Center for Legal Research, 2005. Pp. vi + 108. $40.00 (ISBN 0-935630-61-9).
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| Lecturing to law students in 1823, David Hoffman advised: "A complete law library, at present, consists of many thousand volumes, requiring nearly a fortune to procure them, in addition to the judgment and time necessary for selection." The most recent publications in the Legal History series of the Tarlton Law Library demonstrate the truth of Hoffman's statement. As facsimiles of auction catalogs, these books document the contents and dispersal of scholarly libraries of two nineteenth-century lawyers: Joseph Story (1779–1845) of Harvard and the Supreme Court and Gustavus Schmidt (1795–1877) of Tulane, a Swedish émigre who practiced law in New Orleans and established the Louisiana Law Journal, the state's first legal periodical. |
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Justice Story's impressive library contained over 1,300 law books and roughly 750 miscellaneous books: grammars, atlases, dictionaries, sermons, essays, poetry, and histories. Gustavus Schmidt's library, based on civil more than common law, was similarly wide-ranging in subjects and contained volumes in French, German, Italian, Swedish, English, Latin, and Greek, altogether listing over 1,000 titles. Knowledgeable collectors, each man owned useful bibliographic tools: Story could consult the London catalogue of books with their sizes, prices and publishers, 1801–1831 as well as catalogs of Harvard College and Law libraries; Schmidt owned J-C. Brunet's multi-volume Manuel du libraire. |
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Besides information that might be drawn about the owners of these libraries, these catalogs provide a vehicle for studying the history of law books. Such catalogs offer greatest rewards when seen within the context of contemporary publishing activity, as found in booksellers' catalogs, or when integrated with remarks about law books, often discovered in correspondence, introductions to legal treatises, and biographies. Story's letters, for example, provide numerous comments on books, their price and availability. "I would give $50 for a copy of Sir Leoline's works," Story wrote in 1813 while immersed in prize cases. Two years later and still coveting Jenkins's works, Story asked his friend Henry Wheaton whether they could be purchased in New York. William Wynne's Life of Sir Leoline Jenkins (1724), which printed Sir Leoline's opinions in admiralty, is not listed in Story's catalog (nor in Schmidt's) though both libraries were rich in eighteenth-century imprints from London and the continent. Closer studies of both catalogs should produce details about the workings, failures, and interruptions of the trans-Atlantic book trade. |
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Consider Story's $50 offer in light of prices at the Schmidt sale, where the single most expensive volume, an elephant folio atlas printed in Paris in 1829, is listed for $25. Much interest from the Schmidt catalog derives from the contrast between printed prices, totaling over $4,300, and the prices realized (from handwritten annotations), which total only $906.60, less than one quarter of their estimated value. The elephant folio, Atlas universel de géographie ancienne et moderne of Pierre Lapie, went for $5. A sixty-three-volume set of the Journal du Palais (Paris, 1837–54), a compendium of French jurisprudence, was priced at $175 but was knocked down at $50. Law books may cost a fortune, but with soft prices at this auction held in St. Louis, one wonders whether the collection might have turned a greater profit in Boston, Philadelphia, or New York in the company of lawyers and book collectors with deep pockets. It will be instructive to compare prices in the Schmidt catalog with those in contemporary catalogs, bookseller advertisements, and on title pages of the books themselves. |
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The Schmidt catalog was produced by Charles Soule, author of The Lawyer's Reference Manual of Law Books and Citations (Boston, 1883). His comments appended to many books in this catalog provide information on bindings, history of the texts, and contemporary opinion. Also noteworthy in the catalog are the number of law texts that have been translated: English to French, French to Spanish, Italian to French, Latin to French, German to English, Italian to Spanish. Wouldn't it be useful to discover why a book was popular enough to be translated and where the demand for translation originated? |
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Michael Hoeflich's introduction to both volumes provides biographical and historical background. Karen Beck's careful index of titles in the Story catalogue adds an essential reference point. Louis de la Vergne, Schmidt's great-great grandson, recognized the importance of publishing the Schmidt catalogue—with its annotations and prices—for a broader public. The essay by Kjell A. Modéer incorporates documents from Swedish archives, correspondence about their books between Gustavus and his brother Carl, a Swedish judge. The Tarlton Law Library has made an excellent choice in bringing early law catalogs to light. These two publications will sustain the growing interest in history of the book by focusing attention on law books, their production, distribution, and ownership in the nineteenth century. |
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| Whitney S. Bagnall
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| Columbia University |
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