Q. What is the oldest book in your collection?
A few years ago, the travel site Atlas Obscura posted a wonderful blog post about the oldest books in many of the world’s famous libraries. Answers ranged from a piece of ash-preserved papyrus from Herculaneum, Italy, a victim of the Mt. Vesuvius eruption, housed at Oxford’s Bodleian Library to a copy of the Magna Carta at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. The oldest item in other libraries ranged from cuneiform tablets and papyrus scrolls from Mesopotamia and Egypt that were four or five thousand years old to medical texts from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
At just over a century old, the Washington State Law Library is a comparatively young library in a young state in a young country. Our oldest book is The Newe Greate Abredgement, printed in London in 1551. Our copy of this relatively common English statutory abridgment had the spelling partially modernized on the spine in a later rebinding. The book was published during the reign of Edward VI, the young son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour who died at age 15. It is updated to include the acts and statutes of Henry VIII. The full title is The newe greate abredgement : brefly conteynynge, all thactes and statutes of this realme of England : untyll the xxxv. yere of the reigne of oure late noble Kynge of moste worthye and famous memorye Henry the viii. (whose soule God pardone) newly reuysed trulye corrected and amended to the greate pleasure and commodite of all the readers therof. Notable to the modern reader, English did not have standardized spelling, a project that Samuel Johnson began to address in his dictionary published in 1755. The Prologue to the work is a wonderful display of early printing prowess by Thomas Gaultier, a French printer based in London in the 1550s, several generations after the first English printer, William Caxton who started printing in 1476.
Joseph Henry Beale, a Harvard law professor, and later the first dean of the University of Chicago Law School, was a great bibliographer of English law, an expert in damages and conflicts of law, and an ally of Christopher Columbus Langdell in the development of legal formalism. In the Harvard Law Review, he wrote an article entitled Early English Statutes in 1922 examining the differences between statutes, abridgments, and session-laws. He notes that “lawyers generally were using one or the other of two handy alphabetical digests of the statutes. The earlier of these was called the ‘Abridgment,’ and soon, to distinguish it probably from the abridgments of the annual session-laws, the ‘Great Abridgment.’ ” Thus, The Newe Great Abredgement, our oldest book, is much like the rest of the books in our library — a workaday text used by practicing lawyers and judges to correctly ascertain the current state of the law. It is lovely in both its ordinariness and longevity. (RM)
