Yesterday afternoon, I opened an important old book and was carried back over ten years of memory.
When I say old, I mean the book was printed in 1772. The book is important because it was critical to the development of the modern anti-slavery movement.
I’m in the midst of preparing a series of videos that will tell the story of the legal systems of the world through the story of their books and manuscripts. Right now, I’m working on a video about Blackstone’s Commentaries, the great eighteenth-century survey of the English common law. So I went to visit Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian at Yale Law School, which has the best collection of Blackstone anywhere.
As Mike and I were talking about Blackstone, he also showed me some treasures from his recent headline-making acquisition from the library of British barrister Anthony Taussig. One of them caught me off guard.
