The Collected Works of Lysander Spooner (6 vols)

Weston, MA: M&S Press, 1971. Six octavo volumes. Green cloth hardcovers; variously paginated. Unread, just removed from publisher's shipping box, though with a few very faint freckles of foxing to fore edges, the result of long storage. Still, a Fine, unused set.

Collected writings of the great American freethinker, iconoclast, legal theorist, and political anarchist. The works are reproduced in photo-facsimile, divided into four general categories - "Deist, Postal, & Anarchist Writings" (v.1); "Legal Writings" (v.2-3); "Antislavery Writings" (v.4); "Economic Writings" (v.5-6), each category arranged in order of publication date, the earliest entry being The Deist's Immortality (1834) and the last A Letter to Grover Cleveland (1886). Includes a substantial (62pp) "Critical Biography" of Spooner by Charles Shively, who has also written introductory essays to each entry. This is to our knowledge the only collected edition of Spooner, and an extremely useful reference, especially with Shively's well-researched introductions.

The M&S Press, publishing arm of the Rhode Island antiquarian bookseller Dan Siegel, specialized in high-quality facsimile editions of hard-to-find 19th-century works of radicalism, reform, and social history. Lorne Bair Rare Books has acquired the entire inventory of the M&S Press and now makes these long out-of-print titles once again available to readers, researchers, and scholars.