The first edition of Butler's Lives of the Saints was written by Alban Butler, an English priest and scholar, and appeared between 1756 and 1759.Father Herbert Thurston, S.J., produced the Revised Edition of Butler's Lives which appeared in 12 volumes between 1926 and 1938. This edition was a major rewrite of the original Butler's. This was necessitated, he wrote, because Butler's style, it must be confessed, as judged by modern standards, is deplorably stilted and verbose. The 1956 second edition, revised by English layman Donald Attwater, updated the text by removing outdated, pious homilies and saints with questionable historical existence from the original work. Attwater significantly expanded the collection to 2,565 saints, up from Alban Butler’s original 1,486