Law Tracts, In Two Volumes, Oxford, 1762, First edition

1762. Oxford, 1762. 1st ed.. Oxford, 1762. 1st ed. A First Edition of Blackstone's Law Tracts in an Exceptional Binding Blackstone, Sir William [1723-1780]. Law Tracts, In Two Volumes. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1762. Two volumes. [iv], 257, [7]; [iv], cxv, [5], 135, [9] pp. 4 parts, each with divisional title page. 8 copperplate facsimiles (of royal seals), engraved copperplate Table of Descents and folding Table of Consanguinity. Octavo (7-3/4" x 5"). Superb period-style calf by Philip Dusel, gilt rules to boards, raised bands, lettering pieces, gilt fillets and gilt volume numbers to spines, blind tooling to board edges, pastedowns and free endpapers renewed. Light toning to interiors, minor dampstaining to heads of text blocks in a few places, faint offsetting and light edgewear to margins of preliminaries and final few leaves. A handsome set in an exceptional binding. $3,500. * First edition. The first collected edition, with revisions, of five early works, several of which are quite rare in their original editions. They are reprinted here "with a few corrections and additions"; each of the volumes contains a general index. The works are, Volume I: An Essay on Collateral Consanguinity (1750, Blackstone's first legal publication), Considerations on Copyholders (1758), Treatise on the Law of Descents in Fee-Simple (1759), Volume II: The Great Charter (1759) and Magna Carta, Carta de Forest, Etc. (1759). A "third" edition was published in 1771. (There is no evidence of a second edition, unless one counts the pirated Dublin reissue of the first, which was printed in 1767.) The contents of the two editions differ. The first does not have Analysis of the Laws of England (1756) or Observations on the Oxford Press (1757); the "third" does not have Treatise on the Law of Descents in Fee-Simple. Eller, The William Blackstone Collection in the Yale Law Library 238. Laeuchli, A Bibliographical Catalog of William Blackstone 551.