Rare Book Monthly
Book Catalogue Reviews - June - 2008 Issue
Legal History From the Lawbook Exchange
The Pleading and Practice Grand March.
Horatio Storer and Franklin Heard published a hard-hitting attack on abortion in 1868: Criminal Abortion: Its Nature, Its Evidence, and Its Laws. However, this was an anti-abortion polemic like none you would hear today. Their concern was immigrants - non-whites, Catholics, Jews, etc., taking over the country. They were worried that low birthrates by old-time Yankee families was leading to "race suicide," and a takeover by "inferior races." They attributed abortion to modern fashion and feminism, and declared it needed to be stopped. Item 86. $500.
Item 52 is a most unusual promotional for a set of law books. It is a set of sheet music for something called The Pleading and Practice Grand March. The cover depicts a parade, with a horse-drawn carriage pulling two human-size volumes of this work. Marching behind, are bedraggled, scrawny other books, with human faces and limbs, with a banner "Old Style Text Books" (click the thumbnail image above left). Inside this pamphlet is sheet music suitable for the piano for this march. The promotional was distributed by the Edward Thompson Company, publishers of the 23-volume Encyclopedia of Pleading and Practice. This piece was issued in 1896, though the last volume was not completed until 1902. The composer of the march was one George Bishop. $350.
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