A BRIEF HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL PUBLISHERS

“The history of a nation,” one dictionary says, “is a systematic record of past events; especially the record of events in which man has taken part.”

The history of the educational publishing business in America is likewise a systematic record of past events in which man has taken part. The events of this history include the beginning, the development, and the wonderful improvement in books and book-making since 1691, and the men and women who have taken part in these events are authors and publishers.

Starr King, the eloquent preacher and orator whose powerful arguments in 1860 and ’61 aided mightily in saving California for the Union, was once riding on a very slow train from Boston to New York with a friend, who asked Mr. King if he were going to fill a New York pulpit on the following day, which was Sunday.

“No,” replied the great preacher, “I am not going to fill, but I am going to rattle ’round in Henry Ward Beecher’s.”

A comprehensive history of the American educational publishing business has never been prepared, although a number of writers have produced interesting and instructive books, booklets, periodical, magazine, and newspaper articles covering in some detail such portions of this history as engaged their attention. For instance, Dr. Meriwether and Professor Johnson have rather thoroughly and with reasonably satisfactory completeness given us an account of the schoolbooks of colonial times and of the clumsy and slow process of manufacturing and distributing them. They have described in considerable detail the gruesome text matter of these early books, and their ugly and almost ludicrous illustrations.

Ford has given us a most interesting and historically valuable account of the oldest American schoolbook, The New England Primer, prepared and printed by Benjamin Harris of Boston, the second edition appearing in 1691. This was printed 44 years after Massachusetts had passed a law requiring each town of fifty householders to “appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read.” Others have written of the first Arithmetic, prepared by Nicholas Pike of Newburyport, Mass., and printed in 1788; of the first American Geography, written by the Reverend Jedidiah Morse of Charlestown, Mass., and published at New Haven in 1784; of the first pedagogical and educational book, written by Christopher Dock, America’s pioneer writer on education, a second edition of which was published by Christopher Sower of Philadelphia in 1770. Much has been written concerning the world-famous Blue Back Speller, prepared by Dr. Noah Webster and printed at Hartford in 1793; of Peter Parley’s Geographies, the first of which was published in 1829. Dr. Henry H. Vail, formerly connected with the American Book Company, has written a most interesting history of the McGuffey Readers, of which the first two books of the four-book series were copyrighted in 1836 and the second two in 1837.

Then there have been published such books as The House of Harper, which gives the history of a business concern now more than a hundred years old; a most charmingly written biography of Henry O. Houghton, the founder of the house now known as the Houghton Mifflin Company; a memorial volume giving in some detail the story of the life and activities of Henry Ivison, of the old firm of Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor & Company; a book giving a rather complete account of several century-old business houses, including that of Christopher Sower & Company of Philadelphia; a volume entitled Fifty Years Among Authors, Books and Publishers, by J. C. Derby; Memories of a Publisher, by Major George Haven Putnam; a book on the Old Schools and School-books of New England, by George E. Littlefield, and a brochure published by G. & C. Merriam Company that gives us some interesting glimpses into the history of their business and of the men who have published and distributed to the world the famous Webster dictionaries.

There are also extant a great many valuable periodical, magazine and newspaper articles which set forth in some detail accounts of the founders of other nineteenth century publishing houses, which accounts, together with what has appeared in book form, make a rather inchoate but highly valuable mass of data that could and should be compiled and published as soon as a scholarly man of historical habit can be found to edit and prepare it for the press.

Having a knowledge of the facts just stated, you will agree with me when I say that a writer of a paper to be read in thirty or sixty minutes on a subject so broad in its scope and so important as the one assigned me, can’t do more than “rattle ’round” in its field, to quote Starr King’s figure. If he should try to do more, he would be tempting the Fates.

Realizing, as you must, how unsatisfactory the isolated and unrelated fragments of our history are, do you not feel, as do I, that this Association should take early steps to find a thoroughly competent man to prepare for the fraternity of educational publishers a complete history of their business in America from the day when The New England Primer was printed in Boston to the present time?

The attention of people is frequently called to the great march of progress since colonial days in all that helps to make the world a better place in which to live. It is truthfully said that both medicine and surgery have been perfected to such a high degree that the length of human life greatly has been increased; that sanitary science is so well understood, and its principles so generally practiced, that disease germs born in filth no longer exist in such abundance as in the days when, because of the ignorance or indifference of the majority of the population, food, air, and water carried these breeders of disease to their unhappy victims. We are reminded of the electric light, the telegraph, the wireless, the ocean cable, and the telephone; of the leviathan of the ocean—the great and palatial steamship that crosses the Atlantic in five days; of the aeroplane that has demonstrated its ability to fly across seas, oceans, and wide expanses of land, carrying passengers and mail at a speed almost inconceivable; of the transcontinental lines of railroad that transport people in comfort from ocean to ocean in six or seven days; of the splendid specimens of art housed in our great museums; of the beautiful homes, the really elegant school and college buildings, the great business structures planned by architects as skilled as any the world has produced since the days of the Greeks and the Moors; of the sewing machine, the reaper, the steam plow, the powerful motor truck, and the automobile; of the mighty steel bridges that span our wide rivers; and, in view of all this, we are told by the historian and the philosopher that the last century has been the Golden Age of the world, that all this has brought man a little closer to God, and God a little closer to man.

The twentieth century school or college textbook, and the means employed in making it, evidence a progress in the art of book-making and the character of the book made equally wonderful; for the modern educational publication differs in content and format from the textbook of the early days even more than the modern schoolhouse from the log cabin used a century or two ago to shelter the unfortunate youngsters who shivered and suffered therein while they were receiving such poor instruction as ignorant masters and dames could give them.

But there are a great number of people in this country, some of whom find their way into State, County, City, and Township Boards of Education, who cannot be made to believe that a textbook of this day and generation is very much, if any, better than the textbook of a century or even a half century ago. To their minds one book is practically as good as another, no matter whether modern or old. This, of course, is like saying that the ugly chromos that adorned (?) the walls of the parlors of country and many city homes fifty years ago were as useful and beautiful as works of art as the artistic, oils, etchings, and water-colors that one may now see commonly in the city and country homes of cultured people.

The New York Sun said editorially, May 16, 1915, “Advance in the United States in its schools and improvement in the textbooks have been as great as in any other phase of American life.” The New England Journal of June 24, 1909, said substantially the same thing in slightly different language, but in addition this: “The modern sewer system is no greater improvement over that of 1840 than the examples and problems contained in modern arithmetics over those printed as of that date.”

In what respects does the modern schoolbook differ markedly from its forebears of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries? A careful examination and inspection of the new in comparison with the old convinces one that the new differs radically from the old in (1) content, including both text matter and illustrations; (2) typography and printing; (3) binding; (4) maps; (5) size; and altogether in its much greater attractiveness as an educational instrument.

Allow me to take a snapshot or two at some of the peculiar text matter printed in the American schoolbooks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in order that I may more clearly emphasize the contrast between the new and the old. I pass over the text of The New England Primer with its

and

reminding you only that the bulk of the book was composed of extracts from the Bible, of hymns, and of moral teachings; that the backbone of this book—misnamed a primer, for it was not a primer at all as we now understand the term—was the Westminster Assembly’s Shorter Catechism, which Cotton Mather called “a little watering-pot to shed good lessons”; and lastly, that this primer was the only reader that children had until they were able to read the Bible. As dreadful as many of the doctrines taught in the Westminster Assembly’s Shorter Catechism were, Cotton Mather urged writing masters to set sentences from it to be copied by their pupils.

Comparing itself with this earliest American schoolbook, the modern primer might, in the language of Chaucer, say without being guilty of immodesty:

George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends, published in 1674 a Primer in England. This was republished in Philadelphia in 1701, in Boston in 1743, and in Newport in 1769. The book was not much used except by Friends.

The text matter of Jonathan Fisher’s A Youth’s Primer, printed in 1817, followed closely the text of The New England Primer. It contained a series of short stories in alphabetical order, each followed by a religious, moral, or historical observation. The poor youngsters who were forced to read, day after day, from the pages of these early books, whose text matter was certainly lugubrious and distressing, were constantly reminded of death, the grave, a wrathful God, and a burning hell prepared for the wicked.

The text matter of the early Arithmetics, while not as gruesome as that of the Readers, was in many respects so peculiar as to be quite beyond the understanding of the twentieth century teacher. Allow me to call your attention to two or three of the puzzling things contained in “Old Pike,” as his Arithmetic was commonly known.

When tare and tret and doff are allowed:

Deduct the tare and tret, and divide the suttle by 168, and the quotient will be the cloff, which subtract from the suttle, and the remainder will be the neat.

These definitions will help you to understand the old terms:

Tare is an allowance, made to the buyer, for the weight of the box, barrel, or bag which contains, the goods bought.

Tret is an allowance of 4 lbs. in every 104 lbs. for waste, dust, etc.

Cloff is an allowance of 2 lbs. upon every 3 cwt.

Suttle is, when part of the allowance is deducted.

Neat weight is what remains after all allowances are made.

The following rule is another of Pike’s puzzles. This tells how to find the Gregorian Epact:

Subtract 11 from the Julian Epact. If the subtraction cannot be made, add 30 to the Julian Epact, then subtract, and the remainder will be the Gregorian Epact. If nothing remains, the Epact is 29.

You doubtless remember that an epact is the excess of the solar year over the twelve lunar months, or about eleven days.

In Walsh’s Mercantile Arithmetic, published in 1807, there is an example that certainly would not have pleased Neal Dow. This is the problem:

If 8 boarders drink a barrel of cider in 12 days, how long would it last if 4 more came among them?

I quote another problem that must surely have sent the distracted teacher to her dictionary for first aid to the tormented:

How much will 189 bazar maunds (a maund = 82.14 lbs.) 31 seer (a seer = 2.06 lbs.) 8 chattacks (a chattack = 1/16 of a seer, or 2 oz.) of sugar come to, at 6 rupees per maund?

One arithmetic maker, Jacob Willetts, of Poughkeepsie, set many of his problems in rhyme; for instance,

Dillworth’s Schoolmaster’s Assistant, first published in London in 1774 and reprinted in Philadelphia in 1769, and considerably used in the colonies, contains two examples which the author called “Pleasant and Diverting Questions.” The first is as follows:

A farmer with a fox, a goose and a bag of corn has to cross a river in a boat so small that he can take only two of these three burdens with him at a time. How can he so handle matters that nothing will be destroyed, because he cannot leave the fox and the goose together, nor can he leave the goose and the corn.

The next was an example, the solution of which might possibly be of practical help to distressed husbands:

Three jealous husbands, each with a wife, meet on a river bank. How are they to cross so that none of the wives is left in the company of one or two men unless her husband is also present?

As poor, from our point of view, as most of these old Arithmetics were, George Washington cordially recommended Pike’s as “of great assistance to children desiring to learn the art of figuring.” The pages in many of these early books were printed like those in the Adams, a copy of which I am able to show you, issued in 1814 at Keene, N. H. The text matter, as you see, occupies but a small part of the page, the rest being left to be filled with the solutions of problems that the children had first worked out on smooth shingles, scraps of paper, or slates, and then copied neatly on the pages where the solutions belonged. All these printed books were, of course, a great improvement over the Master’s notebook of an earlier time, from which rules and problems were copied by the children, they not possessing a printed text.

Note.—(1) In the library of Mr. George Plimpton are more than 300 different Arithmetics printed before 1601, the largest collection ever brought together.

Note.—(2) These old arithmeticians are responsible for what we know as the one-sixth discount, for they advertised their books at, say, $10.00 the dozen, the single copy $1.00.

Note.—(3) They were the pioneers in collecting and printing before the prefaces of their books, as Adams did before his preface, complimentary testimonials of their books—a practice that the modern publisher would hardly dare to follow.

If the text matter of the early Readers was in many cases gruesome and distressing in its effect upon the youthful mind, and the explanations, rules, and problems in early Arithmetics were at times ludicrous and extremely puzzling, it is also the fact that much of the text printed in the first American Geographies was ridiculous because the writers frequently indulged their imaginations at the expense of geographical fact. Let me quote two or three examples showing how imagination played havoc with the truth. Dwight’s Question and Answer Geography, printed at Hartford in 1798, contains the following:

Q. What are the customs and diversions of the Irish?

A. There are a few customs existing in Ireland peculiar to this country; these are their funeral howlings and presenting their corpses in the streets to excite the charity of strangers, their convivial meetings on Sunday, and dancing to bagpipes, which are usually attended with quarreling.

Even the scholarly Morse, the author of the first Geography printed in the United States, indulges in some picturesque flights of imagination, as when he writes that the great men of the Friendly Islands “are fond of a singular kind of luxury, which is, to have women sit beside them all night, and beat on different parts of their body until they go to sleep; after which, they relax a little of their labour, unless they appear likely to wake; in which case they redouble their exertions, until they are again fast asleep.” A careful reading of Mariner’s Account of the Friendly Islands, a book published by John Murray & Sons in London in 1817, thirty-four years after Morse published his first Geography, reveals no account of any such custom, and Mariner lived in the Friendly Islands for a number of years.

Adams declares in his Geography, published in 1814, that “the White Mountains are the highest, not only in New Hampshire, but in the United States.” Of course he was speaking of the United States of 1814,—territory consisting of the original thirteen states and Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, and Louisiana, admitted at the time when Adams wrote his book,—but he evidently didn’t know that Mt. Mitchell in North Carolina, the highest peak east of the Mississippi, is more than 400 feet higher than the mountain that bears Washington’s name.

If the geographers drew upon their imaginations when describing the physical features of the country, so also did the statesmen. That great apostle of democracy, Thomas Jefferson, sent a communication to Congress after the Louisiana Purchase, conveying what he considered good information about the new possession. The most curious statement in this strange document was about the mountain of salt. He informed Congress that this mountain was said to be 180 miles long, 45 miles wide, and all of white, glittering salt, with salt rivers flowing from cavities at the base. In all probability Lewis and Clark disillusioned Mr. Jefferson in 1806, when they returned from their trip to the Pacific coast and gave accurate descriptions of the country they had traversed.

The first English Grammar written in America was prepared by Professor Jones, a mathematical professor, as Dr. Chandler tells me, at William and Mary College. This book was written about 1703 and was printed in London. Only one copy of this grammar is now known, and that is contained in a London collection. Another book was prepared by Caleb Bingham, the first edition of which was printed in 1799. It was called The Young Lady’s Accidence. This was the first English Grammar used in the Boston schools. Its only predecessor used in this country was Part II of Webster’s Grammatical Institute.

Lindley Murray left his native country and settled in England in 1784. The following year he wrote and published in England his Grammar of the English Language. This Grammar was the standard textbook for fifty years throughout England and America.

The illustrations in the early schoolbooks were as bad or worse than the text matter. They were not only entirely lacking in artistic quality, but, worse than that, they frequently pictured horrible things that the child during his school day had constantly under his observation. What twentieth century publisher would dare to use illustrations in Readers, Geographies, or any other textbooks, picturing the burning of an unfortunate victim at the stake, a widow burning on the funeral pyre of her husband, or the bloody details of an Indian massacre? And yet these awful things are pictured in a Geography not yet a hundred years old.

Nearly all the books that appeared prior to 1840 were printed from type, for neither the stereotype nor the electrotype plate was in use before that time. Dr. Vail tells us that the early editions of the McGuffey Readers, copyrighted, as I have said, in 1836 and 1837, were so printed. The type impressions of the limited editions were clear and distinct for the most part. Whether these impressions would have been clear had as large and as many editions been printed from standing type as we now print from plates, is of course a matter of conjecture.

It is not necessary to remind you that publishers may to-day furnish a duplicate set of plates to any concern on earth desiring to reproduce one of their books, and that the book may be reprinted by the purchaser without the bother and expense of resetting the type; but the printer of the early days was not so fortunate, for if a concern in New York wished to reprint and sell a book originally printed in Boston, he was obliged to reset it, taking as copy the Boston production.

You remember that stereotyping was not perfected by Stanhope until 1800, and that stereotype plates were not used in the manufacturing of schoolbooks until a later date, but that they were commonly used before electrotyping came into general use about 1860, though the Harpers used electrotyping in 1840 to duplicate wood cuts; that wood engraving was used in Europe in 1830, but much earlier in China; that copper engraving was used as early as 1450; that steel engraving was invented by Perkins, of Newburyport, Mass., in 1814; that the three-color process plate was first made by Frederick Ives of Philadelphia in 1881, but that the development of color work in schoolbooks has been within the last forty years.

You recall the fact that the Adams or flat press was largely used until 1875; that the first flat-bed cylinder press used in America was a Napier brought from England in 1825; that in 1860 William Bullock began to experiment on a rotary self-feeding or web printing press, and finally achieved success in 1865. The web rotary press, as we know, can turn out about ten times as much work in a given time as the flat-bed cylinder press. Considering the fact that many millions of textbooks are now printed annually, requiring the service of high power rotary presses to print their sheets in season for use, is it not indeed fortunate for the educational world that human skill has perfected such a really wonderful instrument as this great machine, so splendidly equipped for the accomplishment of this gigantic task?

The binding of books until a comparatively recent date was entirely done by hand. The process was so slow that only a few books could be bound in a day, even by the largest establishment. Folding machines were not used by binders until 1875, rounding and backing machines until about 1888, sewing machines and case-making machines until about 1890, gathering machines until about 1895, casing-in machines until about 1900. It is well known to you that a modern bindery in which up-to-date machinery is installed is able to produce per day from 20,000 to 60,000 three-hundred-page sewed books of octavo size. It is therefore evident that there has been as wonderful an improvement in the method of binding books in the last century as in the method of printing them, and that the output of a modern bindery is now so enormous that it would have made the heads of the early hand binders dizzy just to think of it.

The New England Primer was, of course, bound by hand. Its covers were of thin oak that cracked and splintered badly with use, in spite of the coarse blue paper that was pasted over the wood. The back was of leather. Neither back nor sides had any printing on them. Yet, despite its ugly appearance, this book has had a sale of at least two million copies since Harris first printed it in or before 1691.

The binding of the old Blue Back Speller until 1829 consisted of back of leather and sides of thin oaken boards pasted over with a dull blue paper. “Blue paper of a somewhat brighter tint,” says Johnson, “was used on the later editions, which gave rise to the name Blue Back.” This book, as you know, has enjoyed a sale larger than that of any other schoolbook ever made in this or any other country—a sale which Mr. Appleton has recently told me has reached the stupendous figure of sixty-four millions of copies.

Adams’ Arithmetic, which I have shown you, you observe was covered with leather pasted over a very thin pasteboard. It had no headbands, and its sheets were stitched by hand. Leather binding on the larger books, Dr. Vail tells us, persisted for a number of years after the beginning of the nineteenth century. This gentleman informs us that the First Reader of the original McGuffey series made a thin 18mo book of 72 pages, having green paper covered sides.

Peter Parley’s Method of Telling About Geography, published in 1829, was a thin, square little book with leather back and flexible pasteboard sides. His National Geography, published in 1845, was the earliest to take the large, flat quarto shape. This form enabled it to include good-sized maps and do away with the necessity for a separate atlas.

Cover designs were not used until quite late in the nineteenth century, and of course books whose covers bore no designs of any sort were far less attractive than those bound to-day.

In 1874, under the direction of Mr. James McNally, of Rand McNally & Company, that concern began the publication of atlases, pocket and large wall maps. In 1872, the Company had introduced the then new relief line engraving process for making maps—a process which revolutionized the methods of that day and cut the cost of production by several hundred per cent. Maps that can now be bought for from 25 cents to $1.00 each used to cost, under the old method of map making, all the way from $5.00 to $10.00 apiece. The modern map, well and thoroughly made, records faithfully every fact concerning the surface of the earth now known to man, and there is very little about it that scholarly geographers do not now know. In addition to the modern map’s accuracy, it is as much more attractive than its forebears to the eye as the beautiful color pictures now used in textbooks are seen to be when compared with the muddy wood cuts that appeared in schoolbooks a century or more ago.

It is not necessary for me to speak in such a presence as this of the contents of modern schoolbooks in order to point out how vastly superior in every respect they are to the contents of books of the earlier days. It would be a work of supererogation for me to comment at length, for instance, upon the character of the literature now included in reading books, or to note the scientific work that is now commonly done in the preparation of one of the most difficult books to prepare, namely, the primer, whose text matter and vocabulary are so splendidly adapted to the capacity of the young child, and whose illustrations picture his pets, his toys, his games, his playmates, and other things with which he is thoroughly familiar. I asked a literary friend to pick out a half dozen of the choicest selections of literature that he knew in modern readers. He replied as follows:

“Even a cursory survey of modern school readers soon reveals that no period in the whole world’s literature has been neglected as a source of selection. We have majestic passages from the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, and Bunyan. The later centuries of English literature afford the names of Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Shelley, Browning, Dickens, Thackeray, and on to Tennyson and Stevenson. The early classic American period contributes freely from Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Thoreau, and Irving, and our early patriots and philosophers like Washington, Patrick Henry, Franklin, and Lincoln, live to-day in the school readers. Even our modern authors have their place. James Whitcomb Riley, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Joel Chandler Harris, and a score of others are no strangers to the child who has in his possession a school reader of the present day. If these were not enough, we have occasional excursions into the Greek and Roman myths, and for the little people touches of the fascinating German and Scandinavian folklore.

“Most wonderful of all, however, is the skill of the editors and publishers of these modern readers in selecting from this world-wide galaxy of authors just the particular poem, tale, or episode that the childish mind can assimilate and digest, and thus be left not only with an introduction to these famous authors, but better yet with a desire to know more of them.”

Recently it was my pleasure to examine the illustrations in a set of modern school readers. I found in them a number of pictures beautifully done in color, copied from some of the masterpieces of world-famous artists, as, for instance, The Age of Innocence, by Reynolds, The Blue Boy, Gainsborough, The Melon Eaters, Murillo, Portrait of a Man, Franz Hals, King David, Rubens, Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci, The Tapestry Weavers, Velasquez, The Architect, Rembrandt, as well as many others made from drawings cleverly done by artists of manifest ability. The pictures in this series of readers were evidently selected with as much care as the text, which contained selections of high literary value.

“If I were asked,” said James Russell Lowell, “what book is better than a cheap book, I should answer that there is one book better than a cheap book, and that is a book honestly come by.”

Prior to the enactment of state copyright laws, the first of which was passed by Connecticut in 1783 and the last of which were enacted by Georgia and New York in 1786, and the passage of a national copyright law by Congress in 1790, literary property had no protection whatever against piracy. Printers could help themselves Previous to the adoption of the Constitution in 1787, the nation had no power to act, but on Madison’s motion Congress in May, 1783, recommended the states to pass acts securing copyright for fourteen years. Dr. Webster traveled from state to state, urging members of legislatures to secure the passage of copyright laws in their states, and some thirteen states did pass such laws prior to the national act; but when Congress finally took action in the matter, Webster’s work was done. It was to his great advantage and that of all authors who have produced books subsequent to 1790 that a national law preventing the stealing of literary property was passed. To Noah Webster and his successful work in securing the enactment of a national copyright law, the literary world owes a great debt.

The international copyright bill passed Congress March 3, 1891, thanks to the diligent and unceasing labors of Mr. W. W. Appleton, the present President of the Copyright League, Major George Haven Putnam, its Secretary, and Robert Underwood Johnson.

It is my hope that this brief and most incomplete historical sketch will convince us afresh of the truth of such almost axiomatic statements as that made in the New York Sun in 1915, namely, that the advance in the United States in textbooks has been as great as in any other phase of American life. Large credit is due both to authors and to publishers for this really wonderful advancement, for both have keenly realized the truth of Disraeli’s epigram which declared that “the youth of a nation are the trustees of posterity,” and have labored diligently to place in the hands of this youth books sound in their pedagogy, accurate as to facts, inspiring in their influence, and as attractive as possible in their appearance, to the end that these trustees of posterity may be sent from the schools full armed to cope successfully with ignorance, foolish and dangerous theories concerning religious and political life, and all other evils that now or in the future may menace our civilization.

The immortal Milton declared that “a good book is the precious life blood of a master spirit.” It has been and will continue to be the happy privilege of the publisher to clothe the good book of the master spirit in a style befitting its character, and to place it within the reach of those who should have its message. That the educational publisher is doing that work with much greater skill now than at any time during the past two centuries is manifest; that he will, as time grows apace, do it increasingly better, who can doubt?