Internet resources for collecting law books

June 8, 2011

[Note: This article was first posted on 8 June 2011; the links were updated on 9 June 2018.]

I prepared the following set of links for the class I’m teaching at the Rare Book School next week, “Law Books: History and Connoisseurship.” Colleagues and readers of this blog might find some of them useful or interesting. If you want to know where I spend my time online, here are a few hints…

Online library catalogues

  • WorldCat: Public-access version of the largest union catalogue of library holdings world-wide.
  • KVK - Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog: Meta catalog of over 50 national library catalogs, regional library catalogs, and union catalogs.
  • ESTC - English Short Title Catalogue (British Library): 460,000 items published between 1473 and 1800 mainly, but not exclusively, in English, published
    mainly in the British Isles and North America, from the collections of the British Library and over 2,000 other libraries.
  • Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (British Library): “The international database of 15th-century European printing created by the British Library with contributions from institutions worldwide.”
  • MORRIS: Online catalog for the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.
  • Yale University Library

 Resources on Book Terminology

Cataloging Resources

Internet Databases for Rare & Used Books

  • AddALL: Searches 24 online databases of used and rare books in North America and Europe (including ILAB and ABE), with the option of restricting searches to selected databases.
  • ViaLibri: Designed especially for rare & collectible books. It allows you to permanently filter out print-on-demand books from your search results (yay!). Another great feature is the ability to search 72 library catalogs, including WorldCat (public version), KVK, ISTC, ESTC, and dozens of other union catalogs, national library catalogs, and individual library catalogs.
  • BookFinder.com: Searches almost 100 listing services (like ABE), online bookstores, and even “rental services” (!) for new, used, and rare books.
  • International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB): Restricted to listings from member booksellers. Offers an automated “wants” notification to registered users (registration is free), a searchable directory of member booksellers, multilingual glossaries of bookseller terms, Carter’s ABC for Book Collectors in PDF format, a calendar of book fairs, and a large “Library” of articles on the book trade, collecting, and related topics. ILAB’s U.S. affiliate, the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA) offers most of the same features, but is limited to U.S. dealers.
  • AbeBooks.com: Registered users can create automated “wants” lists, and are notified by e-mail of matching books.

Book Collecting Resources

Preservation

 Legal History Resources

– MIKE WIDENER, Rare Book Librarian

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Legal bibliography
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