According to the Introduction: Sir Walter Scotts Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft were his contribution to a series of books, published by John Murray, which appeared between the years 1829 and 1847, and formed a collection of eighty volumes known as Murrays Family Library. The series was planned to secure a wide diffusion of good literature in cheap five-shilling volumes, and Scotts Letters, written and published in 1830, formed one of the earlier books in the collection.