It’s back to school season! While this time of year may make many of us nostalgic for crayons and yellow buses, for many early Americans, memories of childhood education would involve a type of book known as a primer. Currently, Library Company staff are finishing the processing and cataloging of the more than 200 examples of these tiny books that constitute the Michael Zinman Collection of Early American Primers. 

Image: Illustrated alphabet from the 1798 Medford printing of The American Primer Improved. Call number: Am 1798 Am Primer 124860.D (Zinman)

Primers were a genre of early schoolbooks intended to teach children to read. They typically included elements like woodcut illustrations, rhyming couplets, and lists of common words broken down by syllable. By far the most popular primer in America was The New England Primer, which print historians estimate had anywhere from three to eight million copies printed between its first publication around 1687-90 to the mid-1800s.[i] This imprecise estimate is due to a mix of factors. For one, these were books intended to be handled over and over by children while they learned to read. Many extant copies, including those at the Library Company, show evidence of extensive use and wear, such as tattered pages, broken bindings, and extensive repairs. 

Image: The American Primer Improved, 1798 Medford, MA imprint by Nathaniel Coverly. Exterior with vernacular protective covering made from scrap paper previously used for a penmanship exercise. Call number: Am 1798 Am Primer 124860.D (Zinman)

Image: The American Primer Improved, 1798 Medford, MA imprint by Nathaniel Coverly. interior of front board, which shows that this paper covering is constructed very similarly to the classic paper bag textbook covers many of us remember making in grade school.

Image: The New England Primer, 1819 Haverhill, MA printing by Nathan Burrill. The back board has a vernacular sewn repair, where the wood in the scaleboard binding had split. Call number: Am 1819 NE Primer 124916.D (Zinman)

Image: Interior of sewn vernacular repair on back board of 1819 Watts imprint. Near the top of both the final page and the pastedown, you can see various scribbles in early 19th century ink.

As primers were quick to print, cheap to produce, and certain to sell, printers all across colonial and early America happily met the demand, making primers staples of print shops across the early nation.[ii]

While these primers were extremely common at the time of their printing, their extensive use makes surviving copies rare today. For example, bibliographic evidence indicates that the New England Primer was first printed by Benjamin Harris (1673-1716) sometime around 1690. However, the earliest known copies that still exist today date to 1727. [iii] The earliest copy held by the Library Company is a 1754 printing from Germantown, which came to us as part of the Zinman donation.

Image:The New England Primer, 1754 Germantown imprint by Christopher Sower, title page and frontispiece. Call number: Am 1754 NE Primer 124842.D

While primarily intended to teach one to read, the New England Primer was also an explicitly religious text.[iv] Written in the wake of the British Reformation, the little book sought to provide a Protestant moral education through the inclusion of short prayers and hymns, a question-and-answer-style catechism, and–most shocking to modern audiences–an illustration of Protestant martyr John Roger being burned at the stake.

Image: The New England Primer, 1797 Philadelphia imprint by Thomas Dobson.  Illustration of Protestant martyr John Rogers being burned at the stake, a common feature of early New England Primers. Call number: Am 1797 NE Primer 124857.D

The New England Primer’s long printing history and focus on children’s moral education offer historians a unique insight into cultural shifts from the Colonial to Early Republic periods. Through gradual changes in the text, one can see how children went from being educated within a colonial cultural identity to a distinctively American one. For example, the Revolutionary War led some printers to make changes in the content of its iconic (and explicitly pro-British) rhyming pictorial alphabet section. In the 1790s, Philadelphia printer Thomas Dobson (1751–1823 ) changed the entry for K, “Our KING the good / No man of blood” to “”The British King / Lost States Thirteen”.[v] By the early 1800s, some printers completely replaced K’s references to a king with a Biblical reference to Korah’s rebellion, as found in an 1824 Newark printing from the Zinman collection.

Image: K entry from Am 1754 NE Primer 124842.D, which espouses a positive sentiment about the King of England.

Image: K entry from Am 1797 NE Primer 124857.D (Zinman), where printer Thomas Dobson changed the rhyme to be critical of the King

Image: K entry from Am 1824 NE Primer 124926.D, where the rhyme no longer references a King at all, but is replaced by the story of Korah from the Bible.

If you wish to come and explore all the various ways these little books changed over the years for yourself, feel free to schedule an appointment in the Scheide Reading Room to view them. All of the primers that are part of the Zinman collection can be found and requested here in the Library Company’s online catalog.