Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition, by Robert Pierce Forbes

By Timothy Sandefur

Yale University Press, 2022

348 pp. $20 (paperback)

Thomas Jefferson was an insatiable writer, composing tens of thousands of letters, as well as pamphlets and essays, about everything from Plato’s influence on Christianity to the economics of whaling. But he published only one full-length book in his lifetime: Notes on the State of Virginia, which first …