What I am calling the Butterworths edition of the Statutes of the United Kingdom had, from 1807 to 1828, the line “And sold by J. Butterworth and Son, Law Booksellers, in Fleet-Street.” on the title page. The 1829 volume had a similar version, but gave S. Booth, Law Bookseller and Publisher, at 194 Fleet Street, as the vendor. After that volume, such a credit was dropped altogether, but the credit “Printed by His Majesty’s Statute and Law Printers” is found in each one.

It was necessary to give these series individual names, as not only are their titles so similar, but one also finds competing series published concurrently. And at the time this series was published, it had a rival also named ‘The Statutes of the United Kingdom’. That latter series was published by Eyre and Strahan, who claimed to be “Printers to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty.” The seven volumes I have OCR’d I have named the Raithby edition, after its editor.

Quite how this situation came to be I don’t know, and it has caused some few headaches. However, I have found a continuous series of the ‘Butterworths’ volumes, from 1807 (presumably, picking up from when the Pickering series ended), to 1841. Further volumes were published, but only a few appear to have been digitized.

From the 1820 volume on, a more modern typeface was used, dropping the ‘long s’; for OCR correction purposes I have therefore split these volumes into two groups. The bibliography here makes no such distinction.

The OCR’d text, currently undergoing hand and automatic correction, can be found on Github in two folders: 1807-1819 and 1820-1839.