Garden of Forking Spooners

The Mises Institute has re-released a 1972 Rothbard-edited collection of Spooner’s writings titled Let’s Abolish Government. So how does it compare with George Smith’s 1992 collection The Lysander Spooner Reader (now sadly out of print)?

Apart from the Rothbard collection’s containing facsimiles of the originals (greater guarantee of accuracy, but also harder to read), the main difference is in contents – overlapping but distinct:

So the only piece that Let’s Abolish Government has that the Reader doesn’t have (apart from the Martin essay) is the Letter to Grover Cleveland. On the other hand, the latter is arguably Spooner’s principal manifesto, providing an overview of his whole outlook.