Nichols Cyclopedia of Legal Forms Vol 4, Reno Judge Belford, 1936

The Piece

Volume 4 of Clark A. Nichols's Cyclopedia of Legal Forms Annotated, published in Chicago by Callaghan and Company in 1936, bound in oxblood pebble grained leather over boards. The front and rear covers carry blind ruled double fillet borders. The spine is lettered in gilt across raised panels, with gilt rules at head and foot, the volume number set in a diamond, and the subject range Deeds to Farms stamped on a dark ground.

At the foot of the spine, in a black panel framed by gilt rules, is the name JOHN S. BELFORD. Law publishers of this period stamped a subscriber's name in exactly that position when a set was bound for a working practice rather than a bookstore shelf. This volume came out of a lawyer's own library.

The book covers sections 4.01 through 4.1968. It opens with drafting guidance for deeds, moves into complete forms including the deed poll, the indenture, the short form, the quitclaim, and a deed Nichols notes was considered sufficient by Chancellor Kent, then runs through statutory forms state by state. Further in, the alphabet carries it into demand notices and contracts for dentists, among them the sale of a practice, covenants as to competition, and provisions covering the trade secrets of dental supplies. Case citations run in footnotes throughout.

This is a single volume from a set of nine. It is sold on its own, as a binding and as a document, not as a working reference.

History & Provenance

Clark A. Nichols was among the most prolific American legal form writers of his generation. The title page of this volume credits him as author of Nichols Annotated Forms, Nichols New York Practice, Federal Procedure Forms, the fourth edition of Cooley on Taxation, and Nichols Applied Evidence, and as a contributing editor to the Fletcher Cyclopedia of Corporations. The Cyclopedia of Legal Forms Annotated carries copyrights of 1925 and 1936, the later date being this printing.

Callaghan and Company was a Chicago law publisher whose imprint appears on American legal literature from the nineteenth century forward. The firm was eventually consolidated into West, now part of Thomson Reuters, through the acquisitions that followed Thomson's purchase of West in 1996.

John Stuart Belford was born in Denver, Colorado, on May 29, 1898. He was raised in Reno, attended Reno High School and the University of Nevada, and took his law degree at Harvard. He served with the Army in the First World War. Admitted to practice in Nevada, he joined the Reno firm of Brown and Belford in 1925 and remained a partner until the death of Judge George S. Brown in 1943, after which he practiced alone. His clients included the Southern Pacific Company and its subsidiaries, the Ely Light and Power Company, and the Newmont Mining Corporation. He sat on the Board of Bar Governors of the Nevada Bar Association.

In 1952, after nearly thirty years of Reno practice, Governor Charles Russell appointed Belford to the Second Judicial District Court, Department 1, succeeding Judge William McKnight. He won the general election that November with just over sixty eight percent of the vote and resigned from the bench in September 1954.

The law ran in the family. His grandfather, James B. Belford, was appointed associate justice of the Colorado territorial supreme court in 1870 and went on to represent Colorado in Congress across four terms, known there as the Red Rooster of the Rockies.

A 1936 imprint places this volume squarely inside Belford's Reno practice years. It is a working book from a Nevada law office, carrying the name of a man who would later sit on the bench in the same city.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A law book earns its place on a shelf by its spine, and this one has the full vocabulary of the trade: deep oxblood leather, gilt rules, panels, a numbered diamond. It reads as authority from across a room, which is why decorators have been buying leather law volumes for generations.

What separates this one from the stacks sold by the foot is the name at the bottom of the spine. Most decorative law books are anonymous. This one belonged to a specific lawyer in a specific city, and that lawyer is documented, down to the governor who appointed him and the judge he replaced. The object and the record line up.

It suits a study, a law office, a library shelf, or a desk where a single handsome volume does more work than a row of them. For anyone with a connection to Reno, to Nevada practice, or to the courts of the Great Basin, it is a piece of regional legal history that happens to be beautiful.