The leather-bound volume titled "A Collection of the Statutes Relating to the Post Office" was printed in London by Charles Eyre and Andrew Strahan. A bookplate on the cover’s interior bears the coat of arms of Lord Walsingham, under which a handwritten note records “2nd Baron, Thomas (1748-1818), Joint Postmaster General, 1787-1794.”
Beginning with the tenth act passed in the ninth year of the reign of Queen Anne (9 Anne c 10), this compilation includes statutes ranging from 1710 to 1793 as well as abstracts of statutes from the reigns of Charles II and William and Mary that were still in force as of 1793. The statutes detail the governance of the post office, setting of domestic and foreign postal rates, and establishing the administration of the system throughout the empire. Several of the measures specifically applied to the British authorized postal system in the American colonies. In 1775 the American revolutionaries and the Continental Congress adopted a postal system that was largely based on the British precursor. The new system effectively ended the application of the British statutes in the thirteen colonies that became the United States.