National Library Week is an annual event sponsored by the American Library Association that celebrates the valuable role libraries and librarians play in their communities. The first National Library Week was held in 1958 with the theme “Wake Up and Read!” This year, National Library Week is being held on April 19-25, 2026 and its theme is “Find Your Joy.”

To celebrate National Library Week, we asked four law librarians to help us find the joy in their library through one unexpected item from their collections. While every library has its most consulted works or the ones with long waiting lists to check out, we wanted to unearth that rare treasure whose purpose or place in the stacks may be overlooked by the average patron, the item that some enterprising librarian once upon a time said, “We need to save this,” if only because it sparked a little bit of bibliophile joy. Quiet, please, and step into the reading room as we turn the stage over to the librarians.

1. Y.B.

Place of Publication: Stanford: Stanford Law Association, 1941-1944
Authors: Stanford School of Law; Stanford Law Association
Shelf location: Special Collections Room
Library: Robert Crown Law Library, Stanford Law School, California

The Stanford Law School Y.B. newsletters provide fascinating contemporary accounts of how World War II impacted the school and the lives of the students and faculty. Stanford Law School students created the newsletter to disseminate news about students and faculty that were serving in the armed forces during World War II. The publication also kept students fighting in the war updated about developments at the law school. Eleven Y. B. issues were published from 1941 through 1944.

The Y.B. was the brainchild of Jerome DeWitt Barnum Jr., class of 1944 and a native of upstate New York. It was a student-run publication published under the aegis of the Stanford Law Association. The newsletter was named after the abbreviation for the medieval Year Books that were the earliest collections of reported case law in England. 

The Y.B. chronicled how the student population shrank from 148 in 1940 to 42 students in 1943. Women students rose from four percent of the student body in 1940 to a high of 48 percent of students in 1943-1944. The newsletters also documented the impact of war rationing and conservation on campus life. In fact, early issues of the Y.B. were stapled with paper folds rather than metal staples because of the diversion of metal stocks to the defense industry.

Military secrecy protocols prevented many soldiers from providing details of their deployments. However, one student revealed in the December 1942 issue that he was working in General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters “somewhere in Australia” and his job involved censoring the mail from the enlisted men.

Some of the most moving entries in the Y.B. involve words of encouragement from professors to the enlisted students. Professor Stanley Morrison, a veteran himself, wrote the following in 1942: 

Professor John Hurlbutt added the following comments in early 1942:

The Robert Crown Law Library is honored to have preserved all Y.B. issues, providing a unique description of life on campus during World War II. The Y.B. newsletters were bound and are located in the library’s Special Collections room.

— Submitted by Sergio Stone, Senior Foreign, Comparative & International Law Librarian, Lecturer in Law, Robert Crown Law Library, Stanford Law School

2. Wisewomen & Boggy-boos: A Dictionary of Lesbian Fairy Lore

Place of Publication: Austin: Banned Books, 1992
Authors: Jessica Amanda Salmonson & Jules Remedios Faye
Shelf location: LAW Treatises, HQ75.5 .S3 1992
Library: Lynne L. Pantalena Law Library, Quinnipiac University School of Law, Connecticut

A library collection is shaped by its users. US Academic law libraries are no different. Our collections may focus on the laws, rules, and regulations of our respective jurisdictions, but, like our patrons, they can contain multitudes. In some law libraries, you may find rare and treasured tomes spanning centuries of use and stewardship. In others, you may find the latest and greatest collection of fiction to rival the best local independent bookstores. In others, like the Lynne L. Pantalena Law Library at Quinnipiac University School of Law, you’ll find a collection lovingly curated by librarians and shaped over time by the scholarly and personal interests of our faculty.

One such faculty member was Mary Moers Wenig. Professor Wenig was a beloved member of the QUSL faculty from 1978 until her death in 2003. During that time, she developed a reputation as the library’s most zealous faculty patron. She consistently had the most items on reserve, the most reference interactions, and donated interesting, thought-provoking, and unique materials to the collection. Professor Wenig’s expertise was taxation, trusts and estates, and marital property. She was a pioneer and advocate for women’s rights and women in the law. Her contributions to the law library highlighted her intellectual curiosity and depth of knowledge.

Highlighted here is my favorite of her contributions, Wisewomen & Boggy-boos: A Dictionary of Lesbian Fairy Lore by Jessica Amanda Salmonson and Jules Remedios Faye. In my first few months as director, the library staff worked together to reconfigure the library’s law and literature collection, once an amalgam of various legal-related fiction into a more formal collection of popular fiction and nonfiction. This title was included, and when I came across it, I stopped cold. What a unique and eclectic book to have in our collection! Talking to the librarians who had worked with her, I learned about Professor Wenig’s interests and generosity to the library. And while Wisewomen & Boggy-boos doesn’t immediately fit into an academic law library’s collection development plan, I knew we couldn’t remove it from the shelves. Occasionally, I will see the book in our ILL return pile and get excited that someone, somewhere, found it in our collection and that we were able to share Professor Wenig’s passion with them.

Holding the book in my hand that day, I knew this, along with many of her other contributions to our library, needed its own collection. The materials donated by Professor Wenig are now part of the Mary Moers Wenig collection and are located throughout the library, highlighting her varied professional and scholarly interests. Wisewomen & Boggy-boos can be found at HQ 75.5 S3 1992. The HQ call number range is designated for Family, Marriage, and Women. 75-76.8 is the range concerning homosexuality and lesbianism.

–Submitted by Jordan Jefferson, Director, Lynne L. Pantalena Law Library and Associate Professor of Law, Quinnipiac University School of Law

3. A Treatise on the Law of Insurance

Place of Publication: Boston: Manning and Loring, 1805
Author: Samuel Marshall
Shelf location: Daniel R. Coquillette Rare Book Room
Library: Boston College Law Library, Boston College Law School, Massachusetts

Not everyone loves learning about insurance law, okay? A 19th-century reader got a little bored reading this tome and did some serious doodling. The front endpaper features a fun, pencil-drawn portrait of a contemporary gentleman. The rear pastedown is where it devolves a bit. We joke that perhaps the pencil sketch of someone puking indicates how the reader felt about the contents of the book. Or maybe it was the closest paper handy for a lawyer’s bored kid. Either way, students always seem amused by the drawings and have a moment of feeling some kinship with their forebears.

Without the drawings, this would be a lovely yet otherwise unremarkable copy of Samuel Marshall’s insurance treatise. First published in London in 1802, this was the first American edition, printed in Boston for booksellers all along the East Coast. Marshall was a distinguished 18th and early 19th-century English lawyer and legal scholar. He held the rank of Serjeant-at-Law, a member of an elite order of barristers who formerly had the exclusive right to argue cases in the England’s Court of Common Pleas.

Marshall wrote this treatise, his only such work, with the goal of capturing, “with as much precision as the subject would admit of, the genuine principles of the law of insurance; and so to arrange and methodise them, that not only lawyers, but merchants and others, might without much difficulty, acquire a competent knowledge of them.” The work covers marine insurance (a type of contractual arrangement that allowed merchants to finance risky, long-distance trade), life insurance, and fire insurance.

This book lives in the Daniel R. Coquillette Rare Book Room, Boston College Law Library. It will be featured in an upcoming exhibition at BC Law on Massachusetts legal publishing in the colonies and early Republic.

—Submitted by Laurel Davis, Legal Information Librarian & Lecturer in Law/Curator of Rare Books, Boston College Law Library

4. Institutes of Roman Law

Place of Publication: Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1892
Authors: Rudolph Sohm & James Crawford Ledlie, Translator
Shelf location: Law Library, Lower East Side
Library: Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, Connecticut

As part of the 200^th anniversary of the Yale Law School, the Lillian Goldman Law Library hosted two exhibits on scholarship and instruction in the area of foreign and international law. In researching for these exhibits, we came across a book in the collection, Institutes of Roman Law: specifically, an 1892 translation, by James Crawford Ledlie, a member of the Middle Temple, of the fourth edition of Rudolph Sohm’s work in German, Institutionen des römischen Rechts.

The work is a standard introductory text of Roman law—perhaps better, perhaps worse than texts that have come before and since in both coverage and pedagogical approach. What made the particular copy stand out is the fact that it is heavily annotated throughout. Not only are there copious marginal notes, but lines, arrows, and circles tie different parts of the text together, making connections to citations, footnotes, and other works and primary texts.

More remarkable, however, is that the annotations are in multiple colors—black, red, and blue. We saw this as foreshadowing the modern practice of students using different colored highlighters when marking up case books (e.g., pink for procedural history or statement of legal issues; yellow for existing legal rules; green for facts; etc.). But in the late 19^th century, rather than neon ink, the markings are colored pencils.

This book, however, seems to use color coding in different ways: to group related words or phrases in more succinct phrasings, or explicitly enumerating lists of factors, drawing the eye to where the definition for each factor begins. Instead of using color to identify the type of information, the colors appear to be used to relate the most important and related information spread out over a sentence or paragraph; while the marginal notes in black contain the annotator’s own additions to the text: summary statements, additional citations, translations, or dates.

When we first discovered the book, there was no evidence of who the annotator might have been. Catalog records provided no indication, nor did the owner inscribe their name in the front pages. We assumed it was some student’s notes, perhaps later donated or perhaps cheekily made by a student in a library copy.

As it turned out, however, the answer was right in front of our noses: over a year later, while reviewing our Roman law collection, we found a second edition of Sohm’s translation, published in 1901 and upon opening it, we discovered the same system of annotations: red and blue underlining with marginal notes in black pencil and identical handwriting. Because the two editions were published nine years apart, it seemed unlikely that these would have belonged to a student. So, the question then turned to, “Who, other than a student, would have owned two copies of this text and heavily annotated both?”

As part of the instruction exhibit mentioned above, we had compiled a database of every course in foreign, comparative, or international law at Yale Law School, including, when provided, the textbooks used. This was one of the reasons why we went looking for a Sohm volume for the exhibit in the first place. When we reviewed that list, there was, as now expected from these two volumes, a single instructor for Roman law during this period: Albert S. Wheeler had taught Roman law from 1876 until his retirement in 1905, and sure enough, from 1897, the Sohm text was often listed in course descriptions as one of the texts required for the course.

Having made this connection, we wanted to see if there were any extant manuscripts by Wheeler in Yale’s Manuscripts and Archives collection, to which we might compare the handwriting and verify that these two volumes had belonged to and been annotated by Wheeler. Sure enough, when we found a folder of letters from Wheeler in the collection, the handwriting was a close match!

Though Wheeler’s handwriting varied over the 33 manuscripts held by Yale’s Manuscripts and Archives collection, we found that when he wrote in pencil (as opposed to pen), many of the recognizable and characteristic letter forms in the annotations matched those in the correspondences held in archive. Most exciting was a letter, written to Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury, a professor of English language and literature in Yale, in blue pencil, just like we had seen in the Sohm annotations.

Rather than our initial assumption, that this was either a student copy or a library copy which a student had taken the liberty to annotate, what we instead have is likely a scholarly commentary upon Sohm’s text, from which Wheeler presumably prepared his lecture notes and/or his own scholarship. They offer not just notes, but connections and links, to other sources of Roman law from a learned professor of Roman law: an insight into not just scholarship but pedagogy.

The process in identifying the provenance of the annotations was long and slow, with new explorations and investigations into texts and sources of information that have surely remained untouched for years, if not decades. But the answer was there all along for anyone with the curiosity to rediscover: a demonstration of the power of the library’s mandate to preserve and provide access to the historical memory of legal information.

—Submitted by Steven A Mitchell, Research and Instructional Librarian and Lecturer in Legal Research, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School

5. Pleading and Practice Grand March 2 Step

Place of Publication: Northport: Edward Thompson Publishing Company, 1896
Shelf location: Daniel R. Coquillette Rare Book Room
Library: Boston College Law Library, Boston College Law School, Massachusetts

Founded by successful oysterman Edward Thompson (1845-1923) and lawyer James Cockcroft (1842-1911) in 1881, the Edward Thompson Publishing Company was an important part of Northport, New York’s economy and community on the North Shore of Long Island. Company leaders helped establish a local bank and church, along with the Northport Fire Department and Waterworks.

One of the law book publisher’s first major projects was The American and English Encyclopædia of Law, which covers substantive law. The Encyclopædia of Pleading and Practice,^[1]William M. McKinney & Thomas Johnson Michie, Compiler Michie, Encyclopaedia of Pleading and Practice under the Codes and Practice Acts, at Common Law, in Equity and in Criminal Cases (1895-1902). This set is found in … Continue reading which is the subject of this lively advertisement, soon followed. It was a 23-volume set published between 1895 and 1902. This project covered all aspects of practice and procedure and is arranged alphabetically from Abatement to Work & Labor. Editor William M. McKinney served as the company’s Vice President and Editor-in-Chief; he also created McKinney’s Consolidated Laws of New York, an annotated statutory code still used today by New York practitioners. 

The company was notable for infusing some color and whimsy into the otherwise drab world of law book advertising with its “visually engaging ads with vigor and flair.”^[2]Ross E. Davies, Law Books in Caricature and Composition: Edward Thompson’s Marketing in the Late 1800s, 28 Green Bag 2d 307 (Summer 2025), http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5558142. The Green Bag (Second Series) archives can also be found in … Continue reading For this marketing campaign, Thompson commissioned composer George H. Bishop to write the grand march, which consists of four pages of sheet music. New York-based Brett Lithographing Co. provided the artwork, depicting volumes of the Encyclopaedia of Pleading and Practice in a grand carriage, while the old-style text books trail behind.

A digital copy of the encyclopedia, along with other law books published by Edward Thompson Co., can be found in HeinOnline’s Legal Classics library. In 1935, the publishing company relocated to Brooklyn and became part of West Publishing Company.

This item is part of our Legal Ephemera collection in the Daniel R. Coquillette Rare Book Room, Boston College Law Library.

—Submitted by Laurel Davis, Legal Information Librarian & Lecturer in Law/Curator of Rare Books, Boston College Law Library

Preserving Treasures with Hein’s Digital Services

Not every library is equipped with the resources and equipment to digitally preserve their unexpected treasures. The Hein Company can help. With our experience and state-of-the-art equipment and technology, we understand how to scan based on document type and we can recommend the most cost-effective approach to document conversion. And we don’t just scan law-related materials. We’ve worked with diverse organizations to scan a diverse array of material, such as media guides for the Buffalo Bills, the student newspaper for Canisius University, publications from the U.S. Golf Association, and high school yearbooks for Christian Central Academy. From the smallest book to the largest microfilm archive, we can handle it all.

Interested in learning more about how Hein’s Digital Services can help preserve your treasures for the next generation? Click the button to learn more about the program and to see a video of our scanners in action.

A special thank you to Sergio Stone, Jordan Jefferson, Laurel Davis, and Steven A Mitchell for their time, patience, and willingness to share their unique treasures for this post.