A not uncommon question of us at the library is “What is your oldest book?” It seems like an easy question to answer, but are we talking strictly about treatises? Law reports? Legislation? What about that some of our oldest “material” (which for us is always judicial decisions) are reprints – reprints that are well over 100 years old, mind you – and not the “original” publication? Not so simple a question!

But, for this post, if we’re taking legislation and law reports out of the equation, the oldest book in our library is:

Archbold’s Summary of the Law Relating to Pleading and Evidence in Criminal Cases, 5th American Edition, 1846.

I feel like if this blog could have sound effects, then this particular reveal would be met with a giant and unsatisfying clunk, as this certainly isn’t some charming and unusual relic of a bygone era. The Archbold is still published by Sweet and Maxwell (the Carswell outfit in the UK), and is currently released as an annual title (and, of course, is now also available online). It was originally published in 1822, and has long been considered the leading British text on criminal law. We’ve seen our lawyers move to using Canadian texts on criminal practice and procedure almost exclusively, but when the CCLA Library was founded in the late 1880s, this book would have been a critically important title. It appears that someone donated their copy of this to the library (that squiggle at the top right corner certainly looks like the signature of the previous owner to me) – do you think they had any idea that this book would be in the library almost 130 years later? At some point this book was sent out for re-binding, so it is actually in pretty fantastic condition for a book that is 170 years old. If you want to take a flip through it, just ask at the desk and we can get it for you! We’d strongly suggest, however, that you don’t rely on this for your research.

I really love looking at old photos of Ottawa, and was especially excited to find this great shot when I was looking for pictures of Somerset House. Our current courthouse is located on at 161 Elgin Street, so most of us are probably quite familiar with the Elgin / Laurier intersection. But behold!

This picture, from around 1948, shows Elgin Street looking north, back when it was considered to be a ceremonial boulevard leading up to the war memorial. The area that looks like a big black circle towards the bottom of the picture? That’s Laurier and Elgin, and *that’s* a traffic circle! The northwest corner is the Lord Elgin hotel, and the southwest is the First Baptist Church, both of which still stand today. The other side of the street is a different story altogether – those buildings in the northeast corner of the intersection were torn down to make way for Confederation Park, and of course we’re now sitting in the courthouse in the southeast corner.

After extensive searching through our old CCLA Bulletin newsletter, we learned that the first CCLA website went live in Spring 1998. Through the magic of the Wayback Machine, we grabbed an image of the earliest archived version of the website:

Now, if you can believe it, the CCLA’s website looked like that until 2010. For those of you who will get a kick out of this sort of detail, the site was built using Netscape.

For an association as old as we are, there are shockingly few pictures from CCLA history. We can’t find any pictures from inside the old courthouse, our conferences and events weren’t well documented in photos (not anymore, of course!), and we don’t have pictures of many of our past presidents (or librarians!).*

We did dig out of storage, however, pictures from when the library at the Elgin Street courthouse was new. Old technology! Temporary signage! The Scotiabank calendar that is *still* in our copy room 28 years later!

1988 (left) and 2016 (right)
Click each picture to enlarge

Here are two pictures of our Canadian Law Reports section – as it was in 1988, and how it is today. It’s hard to believe those shelves ever had so much empty room. When someone does this retrospective in another 28 years, it’s safe to say there will be no law reports at all. With legal research moving online, this section doesn’t get a lot of use anymore, and like the law reports from many other libraries who’ve remodeled recently, this part of the collection will have to go when we renovate our space.

*All that to say, please send us your old CCLA pictures!