Gray v. Harper
U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Massachusetts
This was an action of assumpsit to recover the sum of $841.39, the balance of an account, alleged to be owing by the defendants [John Harper and Brothers] to the plaintiffs [Milliard, Gray & Co.], for sundry volumes of Sparks’s American Biography.
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This was an action of assumpsit to recover the sum of $841.39, the balance of an account, alleged to be owing by the defendants [John Harper and Brothers] to the plaintiffs [Milliard, Gray & Co.], for sundry volumes of Sparks’s American Biography. The plaintiffs, in order to maintain their action, produced in evidence the following agreement: “Boston, May 22, 1839. We agree to take of Hilliard, Gray & Co. any volumes of Sparks’s American Biography, bound or unbound, that they may ship to us, within three months from this date, at the cost thereof, and pay for the same in six months from date…
1Opinion of the CourtStory, Circuit Justice
(charging .iury). It appears to me. that the words of the written contract, “at the cost thereof,” ought to be construed, “all the cost- of the copies,” including the allowance to Mr. Sparks, unless it is clearly made out in the evidence, that the parties, in the use of this language, adopted a different construction, and limited the “cost” to the mere expense of the paper, press-work, and binding. I do not think, that it is absolutely- incompetent for the parties to show, from the conversations between them at the time of the making the contract, what was the sense, in which they then…
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