The courts are disposed to extend copyright to any work involving intellectual labor or brain skill, without emphasizing originality or literary merit. In the important case of Walter _v._ Lane, in which a _verbatim_ report of Lord Rosebery's speeches was protected, by decision of the House of Lords, in 1900, Lord Chancellor Halsbury said: "Although I think in these compositions (_i. e._ the work of the stenographer) there is literary merit and intellectual labor, yet the statute seems to me to require neither--nor originality either in thought or language ... the right in my view is given by the statute to the first producer of a book, whether that book be wise or foolish, accurate or inaccurate, of literary merit, or of no merit whatever." {Sidenote: "Book" definitions} The word "book" covers the great body of copyright property, and has been many times the subject of judicial construction giving the most comprehensive meaning to the term. The English judges early held that protection "could not depend upon the form of the publication"; "that a composition on a single sheet might well be a book within the meaning of the legislature"; and that "any composition, whether large or small, is a book within the meaning of this act." The English law of 1842 afterward specifically construed the word "book" "to mean and include every volume, part or division of a volume, pamphlet, sheet of letterpress, sheet of music, map, chart or plan, separately published." The law of the United States makes no definition of the term, except by specifically including as books "composite and cyclopaedic works, directories, gazetteers, and other compilations"; but our judges have agreed with the English view, Judge Thompson holding, in 1828, in Clayton _v._ Stone, that a "book" may be printed "only on one sheet," and that "the literary property intended to be protected by the Act is not to be determined by the size, form or shape ... but by the subject-matter," and Judge Leavitt, in 1862, in Drury v. Ewing, that a diagram for cutting dresses, with directions, printed on a single sheet, being "the product of thought and mental toil," was a "book" within the benefit of the law. {Sidenote: Inclusions adjudicated}