Congressional slip bills - Slip bills contain the text of bills, resolutions, and amendments as submitted by congressmen and reported out of committee for vote and are printed with widely spaced lines for ease of annotation. They were for internal use by the House and Senate and, because the laws as enacted were subsequently reprinted in volume form, slip bills were typically discarded and were not included in the deposit of government documents that the Society has received since 1814. Stephen Weissman of Ximenes Book Shop had an accumulation of “slip laws,” printed for members of the Senate and in the mid-1970s alerted McCorison to a miscellaneous lot of federal documents from the earliest days of the United States. From Weissman’s lot of these ephemeral materials, McCorison selected 134 items. They included the legal foundations of such basic government services as the post office department and the ordering of militia units. There were “two stars of the lot,” in McCorison’s opinion. One was the bill to promulgate amendments to the Constitution that make up the Bill of Rights. In it, were twelve amendments, but only ten gained approval. The other star was a broadside, a single sheet that established the copyright law of 1790. Afterwards Weissman offered McCorison another lot from which he selected eighty-eight items. The second lot was the gift of the First Federal Savings and Loan Association of Worcester. Congress of the United States: … An act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, charts and books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times therein mentioned (New York: Printed by Francis Childs and John Swaine, 1790). It should be noted that the Society continues to add slip bills to its collection. In November 2009, following Councillor William S. Reese’s offer of any government document in his warehouse not yet in the Society’s collection, Curator of Books David R. Whitesell selected an assortment of 992 congressional slip bills from the 11th, 13th, 15th, 16th, 19th, 24th, 25th, and 28th through 30th Congresses (1810 to 1849). [record] [enlarge: front verso] Congress of the United States: ... Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives ... that the following articles be proposed to the legislatures of the several states as amendments to the Constitution (Philadelphia: Childs and Swaine, 1792). [record] [enlarge]
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The Amerian Antiquarian Society, 1812-2012 - A View at the Bicentennial