the american reading script and its nineteenth-century origins

The American Reading Script and Its Nineteenth-Century Origins

Richard L. Venezky

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, reading textbooks were composed of short selections, drawn from a variety of subject areas, but intended for reading aloud. These texts were almost always compiled by a single person, often a schoolmaster or minister, but occasionally a printer, and they contained few directions for the teacher. In contrast, the basal readers used in most schools today are developed by publishers with teams of designers, writers, and authors. Selections are predominantly narrative fiction selected from among the world's "'best" literature for silent reading. Accompanying teacher guides usually outweigh the readers themselves and are usually fully scripted; that is, they give step-by-step directions for all instruction, often with the actual words that teachers are to utter. The progression of changes that transformed the early nineteenth-century reader into its luxurious present-day version is traced through the contributions of three nineteenth- century compilers: Samuel Wood, William Holmes McGuffey, and Lewis Baxter Monroe.

T he Reverend Warren Burton, writing in the 1830s, recalled that he learned to read in a rural New Hampshire school at the beginning of the nine-

teenth century from William Perry's The Only Sure Guide to the English Tongue (Burton, 1852). This textbook was originally published in Edinburgh in 1776 and then reissued or, as others prefer to say, pirated in North America beginning in 1785. The Only Sure Guide was a spelling book, similar in style and content to the Webster speller that was the first American best seller in the school book trade. Perry's speller, although of foreign origins, was Webster's main rival, and it continued to be reprinted in the United States as late as 1832 (Monaghan, 1983). In the years between 1785 and 1804, one publisher, Isaiah Thomas in Worcester, Massachusetts, issued over 300,000 copies of this text (Carpenter, 1963, p. 150). At the age of three and a hai l Warren Burton was subjected to a daily regimen of letters and syllables from Perry's little speller-- the infamous abs, ebs, and ibs--until he finally graduated to the reading selections, with their heavy lacings of religiosity and their tedious exhortations on moral themes.

Perry's Speller was typical of the first textbooks employed for teaching reading in the United States, but it differed in size, content, pedagogy, and production procedures from the textbooks used today in any of the more than 16,000 school districts in the United States. What these differences are and how the current reading textbooks evolved is the subject of this article. Text- books, and particularly reading textbooks, are much in the news today. A new

Richard L. Venezky is Unidel Professor of Education at the University of Delaware. Address for correspondence: Department of Educational Studies, Willard Hall Education Building, Rm. 211, College of Education, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware 19716.

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sport, "basal bashing," has become popular among educational reformers. The basal reader has been tried and found want ing by kangaroo courts at various locations across the Nor th American landscape. But before we accept these verdicts, we might want to examine how we arrived at the reading texts in use today and to ask how this journey might inform reading instruction of the future.

I shall not at tempt to recite the entire progression of changes that link the present-day basal reader to its impoverished rural school ancestors, nor shall I at tempt any coherent assessment of the social and cultural contexts that differentiate schooling then and now. Instead I want to dwell on the reading textbook itself and particularly on its authorship and publication procedures. The issue that I am most interested in, and which has been the subject of a series of studies I have done over the past four years, is the conditions that led from an author-centered reading textbook at the beginning of the nineteenth century to a publisher-centered textbook by the end of that century.

The Modern Textbook

Let me leave for a moment the precocious Warren Burton in his district schoolhouse and leap forward 185 years to the present-day reading textbook. To describe the familiar and obvious is always problematic. Better that we deal with something from the past where information is less openly available and offers fewer opportunit ies for alternative interpretations. Umberto Eco, a literary scholar and author of The Name of the Rose, was aware of this problem when he stated in a recent interview, "I know the present only through the television screen, whereas I have direct knowledge of the Middle Ages, ''1

The modern reading textbook--what is called the basal reader in reference to its graduated difficulty levels across books and grades-- is characterized by four features that are important for comparison to its ancestors. First, it is composed of a series of reading selections, chosen to represent a cross-section of cultures and story types, heavily biased toward narrative fiction, and neu- tral in attitude toward moral, political, and religious issues.

Second, the reading selections are chosen to be read silently rather than aloud.

Third, the pedagogy that is reflected in these texts and which is described primarily in the accompanying teacher's guide, is usually fully scripted. By this I mean that very little is left to the teacher's discretion or imagination: even the lines that the teacher is to utter in each instructional vignette are fully described. Admittedly, as in a play, there is room for interpretation of char- acter and scene. One can, for example, play an overconscientious and weak Macbeth, in the style of David Garrick, or an upward ly mobile tycoon, as a reviewer characterized the current interpretation of Macbeth by Christopher Plummer, but the script still says, "Is this a dagger I see before me, the handle toward my hand?" and weak or strong, Macbeth had better get it out at the right time. Reading, as reflected in the basal textbooks, is similarly scripted,

18 Book Research Quarterly / Summer 1990

unlike math and science instruction that are only now, perhaps under the influence of reading texts, showing the first hints of such a direction.

Fourth, the modern basal is conceived, produced, and marketed by publishers. Authors are involved, usually in teams, but their roles are determined by corporate editors and vice presidents, and the content of the texts themselves derives more from market surveys than from the collected knowledge and experience of the listed authors.

In contrast, the reading selections in the early nineteenth-century texts were most often fanatically religious and moral, preaching in some cases a highly sectarian brand of Protestantism (Venezky, 1987). This element was slow to leave the readers and was one of the causes of an active Jewish day school movement in the middle of the nineteenth century in the Midwest and of the extensive Catholic school movement in the major cities of the East (Ravitch, 1974, pp. 33 ff.). The former disappeared as soon as Bible reading and other overt forms of Christianity were exorcised from the schools (Garb ner, 1969, p. 7), but the latter has remained and spread.

Selections in the older texts were to be read aloud, and in the higher-level readers of the time, both length and type of selection reflected this (Venezky, 1986, p. 143). The teacher received little, if any instruction on how to use the texts. Separate teacher guides did not exist until nearly the end of the nineteenth century. Only an occasional footnote for the teacher is found in the 180 pages of Perry's Speller, and these are almost all on peculiarities of pronunciation. Webster's Speller is somewhat more informative, averaging perhaps one line of comments directed at the teacher for every five pages of reading text, but these are mostly notes on specific spellings and never reach the form of scripted assistance.

Finally, the older books were written by single authors, usually clergymen or schoolmasters, who sought out publishers and printers on their own. William Perry, for example, was a Scot who taught at an academy in Edinburgh. He was best known for his dictionary, The Royal Standard. Noah Webster, whose speller first appeared in 1783, sold publication rights as grandmothers hand out candy to grandchildren. For the first edition alone he contracted with at least eight different publishers from Wilmington, Delaware, to Bennington, Vermont (Monaghan, 1983). One of these, incidentally, was Isaiah Thomas, who was also the primary publisher in America for Perry's Speller.

The differences between the early nineteenth-century reading texts and the modern ones disappeared by the early 1900s. From the data I have been able to locate on school reading programs, textbook production and distribution, the lives of the authors and publishers, and the books themselves, I am convinced that the content of the modern reader is due as much to free- market conditions for the book trade as it is to educational policy or teaching requirements. To present a part of the justification for this view I will describe the work of three nineteenth-century compilers of reading textbooks: Samuel Wood, William Holmes McGuffey, and Lewis Baxter Monroe, representing early, middle, and late innovations in textbook composition. The first and the

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last are virtually unknown today, and if this article accomplishes nothing else, I will be pleased if it gives the reader some affection for them and their contributions to reading textbooks. McGuffey, in contrast, is known all too well, but mostly through a mythology that deviates markedly from fact. I will be equally pleased, therefore, if the reader comes away from this presentation with a more balanced view of this educator and author.

Samuel Wood

Samuel Wood is seldom listed in histories of reading instruction; his name occurs in few encyclopedias and rarely is listed in card catalogues as an author of school texts. Yet he was New York City's most important publisher of children's books in the nineteenth century, the compiler of the first graded series of readers, and an important Quaker publisher and educator. 2 He was one of the founders of the Institution for the Blind in New York City, a trustee for over twenty years of the New York Free School Society, manager of the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents, and a member of the Manumission Society. He is most important here, however, because he was the first publisher to compile his own series of readers.

Other publishers, such as Mathew Carey in Philadelphia and Isaac Collins in Trenton, had issued their own primers or ABC books; these were the staples of the colonial and early national press, along with business forms, almanacs, sermons, handbooks, and stationery (Lehmann-Haupt, 1952, pp. 34-37). But Samuel Wood was the first publisher to compile a complete series of schoolbooks, and he issued not one but two such series in the first decade of his printing and publishing career. The first series, consisting of The Young Child's ABC; or First Book, The New York Primer, the New York Preceptor, the New York Speller, and the New York Expositor, was issued between 1806 and 1810. The second, and probably more important series, consisting of the New York Readers, Nos. 1-3, was issued in the period 1812-15 and was the first true series of graded readers ever issued. Other authors, like Lindley Murray, had written reading texts with different levels of difficulty, but none of these were planned as complete series.

Wood devised his graded series at a time when New York City had few public schools (Boese, 1869; Kaestle, 1973). The few that did exist were charity schools, operated by church groups for children of the poor. The Lancastrian charity schools, sponsored by the Society of Friends, may have been Wood's initial market, and the rigid monitorial system used in these schools, with its well-defined levels of reading ability, may have been the initial impetus for a graded series of textbooks.

Samuel Wood was born into the Anglican Church but became a convinced Quaker shortly before his marriage in 1782. After teaching school for almost twenty years in and around Oyster Bay on Long Island, he cast around for a more remunerative way to support his growing family. In 1803 he moved his wife and thirteen children to New York City, where he opened a general


merchandise store on Pearl Street, in the heart of the city's printing area. Wood began his involvement with books through subscription publishing and through the sale of secondhand books that he purchased at auction. His first imprints, an antislavery tract, two religious works, and a "monitor," appeared in 1805. By 1807 he had his own press, apparently operated by two of his sons, and his publishing activities increased dramatically. Within five years he was advertising full lines of antislavery, Quaker, juvenile, and school books. 3

In part through the employment of such skilled illustrators as Alexander Anderson, and in part through careful press work, Wood quickly acquired a reputation for quality printing (Weiss, 1942). He had entered the printing business at a time when the distinction between printer and publisher did not exist and when a business could be started with a small amount of capital. An apprentice could expect to move up to journeyman and quickly establish his own business. But before Wood retired in 1836 the printing trade had begun a radical transformation, driven by technological innovation. As a result of papermaking machinery, stereotyping, ink rollers, the steam press, and a variety of other inventions, journeymen and many apprentices were elimi- nated from the production side of printing. In parallel, the high cost of the new machinery, which was geared toward high-volume printing, reduced the ability of most journeymen to establish their own businesses (Rorabaugh, 1986).

The magnitude of the change brought by technology is illustrated by de- velopments in printing presses. The handpress, which remained basically the same from Gutenberg through the early nineteenth century was operated by a pair of journeymen and could produce under skilled effort at most 250 impressions per hour. In contrast, the steam press, which was perfected in the 1830s, could be operated by low-paid boys and girls and could produce 3,000 impressions per hour (Rorabaugh, 1986, p. 86).

Then, newly built canals and roads allowed publishers to operate profitably over a larger territory than before, thus leading to a further squeeze on the small, local printing and publishing houses. Although hand-operated presses would continue to survive for several more decades in the countryside, the city printing establishments that were solvent were those with modern equip- ment. Because of the high start-up costs for a printing business, printing became more and more separated from publishing, except for a small number of large houses. The publishers who were well financed took over the roles of promoters, editors, and marketers, leaving only the dirty work of book production to the printers.

The great leap forward in American printing was marked also by a radically reduced dependence upon British imports. In 1820, for example, almost 70 percent of all books sold in the United States were printed in England. By 1850 the figures were reversed, with 70 percent of the books sold originating in the United States (Trubner, 1859, p. 90). At the same time, the common school movement, engineered by Mann, Barnard, and others, was forcing educa-

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tional expansion, which led to a vastly increased market for readers (as well as other school texts), but one which also organized itself quickly to favor the larger publishers over the smaller ones. Wood's textbooks, whatever their appeal when they were published in the early part of the nineteenth century, were not revised to keep up with changing attitudes and tastes, and conse- quently were only marginally competitive by the 1840s.

As was traditional in Quaker texts, Wood's readers had no truck with fiction, theater, fairy tales, or military adventures, even those as ennobling as the American Revolution. 4 In contrast to a later (and continuing) tradition, Wood's reading selections reflected what he felt children should read rather than what he assumed the populace would buy. 5 His books continued to sell, nevertheless, through his bookstore, by exchange with other printers, and through the Quaker network that connected via Monthly and Yearly Meetings to Quaker businesses and schools over the entire Northeast.

After Samuel Wood's retirement, the firm passed to his sons, and then to a grandson, and finally to a great grandson before it was absorbed by a larger house during the Depression. 6 Rights to almost all of the reading texts were sold in the 1860s. The acquiring firm advertised a new printing of the New York Readers, but no such imprints have been found and I suspect none was issued. Samuel Wood died in 1844, his contribution to the American reading script generally unrecognized.

William Holmes McGuffey

By the time that Samuel Wood retired from publishing, the capital of the western book trade had shifted to Cincinnati, where the McGuffey Readers originated (Sutton, 1961). The author of these readers, William Holmes McGuffey, has been as overpopularized in this century as Samuel Wood has been ignored.7 But the true McGuffey reader story lies not in the dour, Cal- vinistic William Holmes McGuffey, but in the astute manager and marketer, Winthrop B. Smith, the originator of the idea for the McGuffey readers and their first publisher. This is also the story of the ascendancy of the large textbook publishing houses in the United States, the Goliaths of the trade, and the commercialization of elementary education.

Book publishing in the United States increased rapidly in volume and in dollars through the nineteenth century as discretionary money and time increased for private citizens and as schooling opportunities expanded. In 1820, for example, the total value of book production was estimated to be $2.5 million; by 1840 this had increased to $5.5 million, and by 1850 to $12.5 million (Trubner, 1859, pp. 89-90). This a fivefold increase in dollar value over a period in which the population increased by only half that much. Of this total, schoolbooks accounted for about one-third. Textbooks by the 1850s were purchased by some school districts, rather than just by parents and individual schoolmasters, and readers were issued more frequently in graded series as large urban schools with age-graded classrooms became more common.


Winthrop B. Smith came to Cincinnati in 1830 and with William T. Truman organized in 1833 the publishing firm Truman, Smith & Co. s Of Truman we know little, but from the beginning Smith appeared to be the innovative member of the ownersh ip team. The idea for an eclectic series of textbooks apparently dawned early in the 1830s. Joseph Ray, a local mathematics teacher, was commissioned to write an arithmetic text, which appeared in 1834 as the Eclectic Arithmetic and became an immediate success. A sequel to this text, Ray's Practical Arithmetic, published by Truman and Smith three years later, was the most successful text of its kind in the nineteenth century and con- t inued to sell even into this century (Carpenter, 1963, pp. 145-47).

As soon as the first edition of Ray's arithmetic had appeared, Smith ap- proached Catherine Beecher, sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe and proprietor of a local female academy, to write a series of readers. She declined but recom- m e n d e d a family friend, William Holmes McGuffey, who was then a professor at Cincinnati College. Between 1836 and 1838 a primer, four readers, and a speller were produced by William and his younger brother, Alexander Hamil- ton McGuffey. A fifth reader was added in 1844, a sixth in 1857, and a high school reader in 1863. Of these texts, there is evidence that the younger brother wrote the fifth, sixth, and high school readers, and may also have writ ten the fourth reader (Sullivan, 1927, p. 19n). The primer was a commer- cial failure and was wi thdrawn soon after it was introduced. William Holmes McGuffey, therefore, wrote only three of the more popular texts for sure, and possibly a fourth.

The Eclectic Reading Series was billed as a regional product, free from effeteness and other eastern maladies, but not long after its launching the publishers of an eastern series of readers brought suit against McGuffey and his publishers, claiming "over-imitation" and violation of copyright--al l in the texts that William Holmes McGuffey wrote. Although the suit was settled out of court, the case against McGuffey was convincing by mode rn standards (Venezky, 1987, p. 251). Nevertheless, minor changes were made to the second and third readers to eliminate the most flagrant evidence of pirating, and the series cont inued on its way, in time becoming the most widely used readers in U.S. history. The regional orientation was dropped in the 1840s as a national market developed. By the 1880s over three million copies per year were being sold; even in the first decades of the twentieth century, w h e n the series was long out of date, over forty-nine different McGuffey titles were stocked and sold by its publisher. 9

In the evolution of the American reading script, the McGuffey readers represent several major transitions, the most important of which was the use of a highly aggressive market ing strategy, backed by frequent revisions to appeal to changing tastes and to compete with new materials brought out by other publishers. The Puritan orientation of William Holmes McGuffey, with its emphasis on original sin and its stern attention to biblical admonit ions, was quickly weeded out in favor of play, materialism, and other pursuits more palatable to the ever more earthly nineteenth-century middle class (Wester-

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hoff, 1978). Major revisions were made in 1838, 1844, 1853, 1857, and 1879 with minor revisions in many of the intervening years. Selections were tried in one or two editions, sometimes moved to another grade level or, more often, replaced. Of the 1,067 titles that appeared in all editions of the fourth, fifth, and sixth readers, 607 appear in only one edition (Nietz, 1964). These revisions were directed from within the publishing house; McGuffey played some role in the 1844 changes but had no further influence, direct or indirect, on the series.

The criteria for keeping or replacing a selection had little to do with educational value. Popular tastes, as reflected by adult social norms, dictated the McGuffey selection process as strongly as it influences reader content today. For the early nineteenth-century texts a canon of sorts existed, centered around religion, morality, and nationalism. But as the country matured and Protes- tantism shifted from morality to materialism, the older constraints on reader content dissolved. By the end of the century good literature would be the main guideline, and the need to change selections frequently to appeal to changing tastes would increase. Books that once instructed and guided, albeit narrowly, now merely entertained.

The second change was the inclusion of a lesson plan, which included vocabulary and pronunciation activities before reading a selection, and com- prehension questions and articulation exercises afterwards. This was a step toward a fully scripted teaching guide, but not yet of the form seen today. The introduction to the third reader (McGuffey, 1840, p. 10) notes that "'the questions appended to each lesson a r e . . , designed to suggest rather than to direct the interrogative method of oral instruction." The lesson plan built around a reading selection originated with Samuel Worcester, whose 1826 primer was probably the most innovative reading text of the nineteenth century. Worces- ter not only included a sequence of steps for teaching the lesson, but also gave extensive teaching suggestions. It was Worcester's model that McGuffey cribbed, along with many of Worcester's selections, and it was Worcester and his publishers who brought suit against the McGuffey gang.

The inclusion of a lesson plan reflects the pedagogical influence of the Pestalozzian schools, with their carefully sequenced lessons. But the desire to include any instructional apparatus appears to derive mostly from the need to distinguish a product in a marketplace overrun with primers and readers. It is ironic that from the nineteenth century on, as teachers were better and better trained, the reading textbooks treated them as less and less competent by increasing the explicitness of the teaching instructions.

The last part of the McGuffey story is the McGuffey myth itself, and space is too limited to make much of that. Prior to 1928 neither the Encyclopedia Britannica nor any other major encyclopedia carried an entry for McGuffey. The current exalted view of McGuffey appears to be a direct result of the efforts in the 1920s of Henry Ford, who reissued and popularized the 1857 edition of the McGuffey Readers, and Mark Sullivan, whose chapter in volume 2 of Our Times promoted McGuffey to the pantheon of American educators


(Sullivan, 1927). It is noteworthy that Henry Ford reissued the 1857 edition, which still retained some of McGuffey's old-time religion, rather than the more popular but more secular 1879 edition.

McGuffey left Cincinnati in 1845 to become professor of moral philosophy at the University of Virginia. By contract, he received no royalties beyond an initial $1,000, but through the generosity of the publishers, many of whom had become rich through McGuffey Reader sales, he did receive a barrel of hams each year, and after the Civil War, an unspecified annuity until his death. He died at Charlottesville in 1873, the same year that Charles Hubbard Judd, a later critic of reading textbooks, was born. Modern hagiographies ascribe to McGuffey virtues far beyond what the evidence supports; primary credit for the success of the McGuffey Readers should be given to Winthrop B. Smith and the publishers who succeeded him. They established a com- mercial standard for reader design and marketing that remains to this day.

Lewis Baxter Monroe

The third and last chapter of this tale is devoted to Lewis Baxter Monroe, superintendent of physical and vocal culture in the Boston public schools, founder and dean of the Boston University School of Oratory, and compiler of the Monroe Readers, an important reading series that was completed in the year that McGuffey died. The Monroe Readers mark the last gasp for reading instruction built around oral reading and elocutionary principles, and--with their accompanying teacher guide--the last step in the development of the scripted lesson plan. Monroe also represents the demise of the author- initiated reading series. Other authors would set out on their own to develop reading programs, but by the 1870s the dominant development technique was through publisher-initiated projects.

Lewis Baxter Monroe was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1825 and died in Dublin, New Hampshire, in 1879, leaving a widow and three young daughters. 1~ His mother was English and his father was Scottish. He was a sickly child whose illnesses followed him throughout his life. At the age of twenty-five, falling ill yet again with accompanying loss of voice, he set out for Paris where at a famous gymnasium he was introduced to vocal gymnastics, that forgotten art of correct breathing and upper respiratory exercising that builds stentorians out of even the most meek and inarticulate. Cured, he returned to the United States as a true believer, taking up public reading and the private teaching of vocal gymnastics, in both of which he excelled. (I have found no record of him doing the dagger speech from Macbeth, but some recitations he did from Hamlet were recalled by a former student with great affection after his death. 11) In 1873 he founded the School of Oratory at Boston University, an institution of dubious academic merit for future preach- ers, lawyers, and schoolteachers to learn correct breathing, tongue and glottis coordination, and the orotund tonality. It was the most renowned oratorical institution of the nineteenth century and included among its faculty Alex- ander Graham Bell and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

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Beginning in the early 1870s Monroe published, no doubt with the assistance of his wife, Adeline, the first of the Monroe Readers. An anonymous reviewer in the Chicago Schoolmaster praised the choice of selections in the first of the series to appear, stating that "the book abounds in lessons requiring naturalness of tone, and has but few of 'The Raven' class by which stilted methods of expression are taught" ("Books Received," 1871, p. 329). (The reviewer obviously did not know that Monroe often taught and demonstrated this unnatural, stilted style.) In all, the series consisted of a primer, six graded readers, a speller, wall charts, and (in time) a teacher text entitled How to Teach Reading, which was written by Monroe's wife (Mrs. L. B. Monroe, 1888). This teacher text is one of the earliest ever published to accompany a series of readers, giving suggestions and often complete scripts for readiness activities, phonics lessons, oral reading exercises, and integration of speaking and writing into reading. The degree of scripting is characterized by passages like the following: "Then the teacher should proceed according to directions on Chart 4: 'Children, when you see this letter with three up-and-down lines in it, you should call it thus'; and the teacher makes the sound of m with closed lips" (ibid., p. 11).

The series is considered among the ten or so most popular for its time (Nietz 1961, pp. 94-95), with a single revision occurring in 1883-84, under the direction of Monroe's widow. A day book from the original publisher, Cow- perthwait & Co., shows that as late as 1890 copies were being sold frequently throughout the East and Midwest. 12 But the consolidation of the publishing industry that began in the late 1880s led to Cowperthwait's list being taken over by another Philadelphia publisher, E. H. Butler & Co., who then merged with Sheldon & Co. to form Butler, Sheldon, & Co. The new company sold out after the turn of the century to the new colossus of the publishing trade, the American Book Co., thus bringing the Monroe Readers under the same corporate ownership as the McGuffey Readers and about fifteen other readers obtained through mergers and buy-outs (Tebbel, 1972). The Monroe Readers continued to sell into the twentieth century, but barely. Surviving correspondence with Mrs. Monroe discusses copyright renewals for some of the texts in 1916 but also shows that the publisher wished to engage in no further revisions.13

With the Monroe Readers and their accompanying teacher guide, the model for the American reading script was nearly in place. Left to be done was the conversion from oral to silent reading, which occurred at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, and was marked particularly by longer reading selections chosen for their literary rather than their oratorical features. Monroe's untimely death did not begin the demise of elocution and oral reading; that was already evident by the end of the Civil War (Baskerville, 1979, p. 19). The contrast at the Gettysburg cemetery ded- ication between Edward Everett's two,hour oration, patterned on Pericles' funeral oration for the fallen of Athens (Brann, 1976), and Lincoln's ten- sentence address, uttered in plain style in barely three minutes, was not lost on the generation that dominated American life after the Civil War. The


trustees of Boston University used Monroe's passing to quickly and perma- nently close the School of Oratory, and although other such schools survived for a little while longer, none has since occupied such a prominent position in American life.

Epilogue

This, then, is a view across three stations in the development of the modern reading text. Central to this investigation are the assumptions that classroom instruction in reading has been guided over the last 250 years primarily by the reading textbooks, and that textbooks have been heavily influenced by the varying conditions of the publishing industry. Limits clearly exist on what publishers can impose on the schools, but the complex linkage between instruction and achievement makes evaluation of textbook effectiveness diffi- cult, so that surface features assume a higher importance than they should.

Some claim that only less qualified teachers depend upon textbooks. For example, a Czech educator, publishing in Prague in 1930, stated that "a badly prepared teacher is dependent upon the textbook. This explains the long- windedness of many American textbooks and the array of details contained therein. ''14

But a more insightful view, true even for the present, was expressed by the Education Commission of the City of Chicago in their 1898 report: "The rigid requirement of certain textbooks for all grades unduly hampers the individual teacher, who has a definite problem of accomplishing certain educational results with a given number of pupils during a given period. ''is So long as schoolboards and superintendents require the use of textbooks, the focus of reading instruction will be upon their contents and not upon the skill and resourcefulness of the teacher.

The textbook publishers will continue to vie for market shares through whatever means are available to them, be they of educational benefit or not. It was not by accident that Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was excluded from the two most popular reading series of the 1880s and 1890s; the potential income from the southern market was far more important to the publishers of these series than was a proper reflection of American rhetoric. Similarly, important selections, particularly nonfiction ones, are excluded today for fear they might alienate some segment of the market. Reading textbooks represent a multimillion-dollar industry in which most of the rewards are for those who can sustain the high development costs and then achieve high volumes of sales. The United States has long since made the transition from a craft production of readers, with local authors writing and producing for a local au- dience, to a mass production industry where each product must appeal across states and social levels. In this regard, the reading industry is no different from the furniture and clothing industries. Major improvements in reading instruction will result not from pressure for better textbooks, but from better- prepared teachers and better understanding of teaching and learning.

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Harvard University Press. Lehmann-Haupt, Hellmut (1952). The Book in America. 2nd ed. New York: Bowker. Lewis Baxter Monroe (1889). Werner's Voice Magazine 11 (No. 9), 170-71. Lindberg, Stanley W. (1976). The Annotated McGuffey. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. McGuffey, William H. (comp.) (1840). Eclectic Third Reader. Cincinnati: Truman & Smith. Minnich, Harvey C. (1936). William Holmes McGuffey and His Readers. New York: American Book Company. Monaghan, E. J. (1983). A Common Heritage: Noah Webster's Blue-Back Speller. Hamden, CT: Archon Books. Monroe, Lewis B. (1911). Physical and Vocal Training, with Biographical Sketch and Personal Reminiscences. New

York: Edgar S. Werner. [Original publication 1869] Monroe, Mrs. L. B. (1888). How to Teach Reading. Philadelphia: Cowperthwait. Nietz, John A. (1961). Old Textbooks. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Nietz, John A. (1964). "Why the Longevity of the McGuffey Readers?" History of Education Quarterly 4,

119-25. Ravitch, Diane (1974). The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1973. New York: Basic Books. Rorabaugh, William A. (1986). The Craft Apprentice. New York: Oxford University Press. Ruggles, Alice McGuffey (1950). The Story of the McGuffeys. New York: American Book Co. Sullivan, Mark (1927). Our Times: The United States, 1900-1925, vol. 2. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Sutton, Walter (1961). The Western Book Trade: Cincinnati as a Nineteenth Century Publishing and Booktrade

Center. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Tebbel, John (1972). A History of Book Publishing in the United States, vol. 1. New York: R. R. Bowker. Trubner, Nikolaus (1859). Trubner's Bibliographical Guide to American Literature. London: Trubner & Co. Vail, Henry (1911). History of the McGuffey Readers. Cleveland: Burrows Brothers. Venezky, Richard L. (1986). "Steps toward a modern history of American reading instruction." Review of

Research in Education, 13, 129-67. Venezky, Richard L. (1987). "A history of the American reading textbook." Elementary School Journal 87,

247-65. Weiss, Harry B. (1942). "Samuel Wood & Sons, early New York Publishers of childrens' books." Bulletin of

the New York Public Library 46, 755-71. Westerhoff, John H., III (1978). McGuffey and His Readers. Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon. Wood, Samuel (comp.) (1812). New York Reader, no. 1. New York: Samuel Wood. Wood, William C. (1904). One Hundred Years of Publishing, 1804-1904: A Brief Historical Account of the House

of William Wood and Company. New York: Wood. Wright, LueUa M. (1932). Literary Life of the Early Friends. New York: Columbia University Press.

Notes

This article is, with minor revisions, the text of the first Marilyn Sadow Memorial Lecture, delivered at the University of Chicago on May 26, 1988. I am grateful to the Department of Education at the University of Chicago for the invitation to inaugurate this lecture series, and to Dr. Leo Sadow for cherishing the memory of his late wife Marilyn through this lectureship.

1. New York Times Book Review, 14 October 1984, p. 35.

28 Book Research Quarterly ! Summer 1990

2. Several articles have sketched Samuel Wood's publishing activities (e.g., W. C. Wood, 1904; Weiss, 1942; Joseph, 1987), but no imprint list or biography has been published. The information for this section has been gathered primarily from correspondence, business records, and imprints in the collections of the New York Historical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Rhode Island Historical Society, the Quaker Collection of the Haverford College Library, the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College, and the Society of Friends Archives in New York City (Haviland Reading Room).

3. See Densmore (1985) for a description of New York State Quaker printers. 4. Notes on Quaker reading restrictions can be found in Frost, 1973; Cox, 1930; and Wright, 1932. 5. Two examples from Wood's children's books illustrate his attitude toward children's reading. The first,

drawn from the preface to The Lottery, printed by Wood in 1815, admonishes parents "'to examine what their little ones read, to prevent them from spending their precious time with books that may injure their morals, or give them incorrect ideas of things." The second, extracted from a reading selection called "Duties of Children," which appeared in the New York Reader, No. 1, tells children, "'Do not read any book but those which your parents, or teachers give you leave to read. Some books are not proper for you to read: they are like bad companions; they teach wrong things. It is better not to read at all than to read bad books" (S. Wood, 1812, p.123)

6. The firm, which began to specialize in medical publications in the middle of the nineteenth century, changed its name several times as new generations of Woods took control. It was calted William Wood & Co. when it was purchased by Williams and Wilkins of Baltimore in 1932. Williams and Wilkins still publishes medical texts.

7. Although William Holmes McGuffey has been the subject of numerous articles and books (e.g., Minnich, 1936; Vail, 1911; Ruggles, 1950), his biographers appear to have made little effort to separate myth from fact. Among the few reliable sources are Lindberg, 1976 and Westerhoff, 1978.

8. The only imprint by Truman, Smith & Co. that has survived from 1833 is The Picture Reader, a 48-page introductory reading text by "A friend to youth.'" Shortly after this date the name of the firm was changed to Truman and Smith.

9. "Use Book, 1905-1912," American Book Company Archives, Syracuse University. 10. Biographical notes on Monroe are found in the 1911 reissue of his Physical and Vocal Training (Monroe,

1911, pp. 103-105), and in an anonymous article in Werner's Voice Magazine ("Lewis Baxter Monroe," 1889). Additional materials for the description included here were obtained from the institutional archives at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University; the manuscript collections of Dartmouth College, New York University (Henry Barnard MSS), the Pennsylvania Historical Society, Syracuse University, and the Boston Public Library; the Peterborough (N.H.) Town Library; the Boston Church of the New Jerusalem (Swedenborgian); and from correspondence with two of Mon- roe's descendants, Moritz E. Pape of San Francisco, and Monroe G. Barnard of Irvington, Virginia.

11. Mary S. Thompson, "Reminiscences of Lewis B. Monroe." Included in the 1911 reissue of Monroe's Physical and Vocal Training (Monroe, 1911, pp. 106-11).

12. Manuscript Collection, Pennsylvania Historical Society. 13. Monroe folder, American Book Company Archives, Syracuse University. 14. Uher, 1930. Cited in Bagley, 1931, p. 24n. 15. Cited in Bagley, 1931, p. 8.

the american reading script and its nineteenth-century origins

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