Updating and upgrading

After a lengthy and enjoyable Memorial Day weekend I returned to my legal literature studies. The onset of Rare Book School grows ever closer, now merely a few days away rather than my previous timekeeping of a few weeks.

On a whim I returned to review the preliminary reading list last week. It as a good thing too, as the reading list had been completely updated and renovated. Gone were the works previously residing on the list that had seemed old and outdated, like Gordon's survey article reviewed here last week. In their place was a revitalized list with highly accessible and contemporary readings and websites.

I have taken time to examine quite a number of the websites and enjoyed quite a few of them too. Of particular note is Dying Speeches & Bloody Murders: Crime Broadsides Collected by the Harvard Law School Library. Perusing this site proved to be both entertaining and gruesome. A heinous collection of "bloody murders" and the admonishments of the "last words" of those who had lately been brought to justice can be found and examined with a great degree of accuracy, thanks to the enlarging options that allow the viewer to really delve into the text at hand. An intriguing feature of these "last words," filled with regrets and cautionary reminders for the living, are often set in verse. I dare say that these are the product of the broadside's author rather than the condemned, but I could be wrong. We'd have to ask one of the 100,000 people who attended the hanging of Henry Fauntleroy to verify.

From examining this site I learned that I own a couple of 19th century crime pamphlets. I will look at them again with renewed interest. I've gone through much of our readings with one had wielding a fine tooth comb and the other on the keyboard searching for titles listed in footnotes and bibliographies in our readings. The Annuals of Murder: A Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets on American Murders from Colonial Times to 1900 now sits on my desk. After briefly paging through it this book looks to be a most interesting bibliography. I'll look forward to looking up my own pamphlets as well as any the WVU Law School might have in their collection.

As someone who has spent most her professional and scholarly career examining publishers' bookbindings, I was delighted to look at Boston College's site, Exhibit Highlights from the Daniel R. Coquilette Rare Book Room, of an exhibit on Books and Their Covers: Decorative Bindings, Beautiful Books. I have seen some beautifully decorated bindings for law books, but in my experience they are far and few between so I was delighted to visit this exhibition from last spring. The application of gold, vellun, marbled papers, or the acids used to create the attractive patterning known as tree calf, for the tree like structure formed on the leather by the acid wash, can make any book truly beautiful.

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statues in the Yale Law Library is a blog I had already bookmarked as a destination. There are two out of four volumes of Justinian's Codex here at WVU. The Codex and the Novellis are both missing their title pages. I am having a great deal of difficulty deciphering any printing history for these volumes and I had discovered this site when searching the Codex on the web. It seems I will need to photograph some pages and post them to Flickr in order to invite others, such as the good folks on the rare book listserv ExLibris, to weigh in.

A substantial site, Freedom of the Seas, 1609: Grotius and the Emergence of International Law, provides a comprehensive view of the development of International Law. The site is peppered with a fine array of images. I particularly enjoyed looking at a copy of the first edition of John Selden's Mare Clausum and the map of the "British sea."

These sites provide interesting glimpses into many individual and fascinating aspects of law. I'll look forward to delving into other websites on the list as time permits.