ir training in English schools. The legal materials they used were English. Aside from collections of local statutes, the colonies published no native law books to speak of. All the treatises were English. All the published reports were English. Anybody who wanted to learn about law had to read English books; and soon there arose a need to have institutionalized places in which these books could be housed for easy and continuous usage.
Therefore, libraries that specialized in a particular subject or topic were demanded and eventually established. Many such collections concentrated on theology, literature, medicine, science, law, husbandry, and agriculture. Such collections were known as social libraries. The second factor involved in the growth of law libraries was that of private collections and personal libraries, chief among them being that of Thomas Jefferson, who was a great bibliophile of his day.
The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature, purpose, and utility of one such specialized institution, namely the law library, within the context of the social library in eighteenth-century America.
The movement for the formation of social libraries, begun in the 1740s, gathered increasing momentum to the eve of the Revolutionary War. By 1775, each of the present New England States had at least one social library, while in Connecticut these libraries underwent a particularly vigorous growth.
No record has survived to tell of the first social library or even of the earliest examples. But we can be certain that it was not the invention of Benjamin Franklin, although he was a great participator in it. Perhaps the idea of the social library came from a number of different sources, chief among them being England.
England was familiar with the social library before any were established in Colonial America, since there were book clubs in England as early as the 1720s, if not before.
It was just at this time that...