had to do with the corners. When the leaves began to be dog-eared, he would get out his knife and carefully pare off the page corners of the entire book;

Reduced one-third.

and if he had an

eye for beauty, he was not satisfied with a straight cut, but would round the corners. As soon as the leaves again showed a dogeared tendency, the paring process was repeated. For nearly fifty

years after the Revolution the

common text

book binding was either full leather, or was a leather back attached to sides of wood that were pasted over with blue paper. The full leather books, unless

quite thin, had the titles on the backs; the others had no lettering. Occasionally, instead of blue paper, there was marble paper or a fancy paper suggestive of wall-paper on the sides. The earliest book I

have seen with printed sides is dated 1818, but within the next decade cover printing became common. It soon was customary to print on the back cover a list of books issued by the publisher. At first, however, the publisher, if he was also a bookseller and stationer, as he was pretty sure to be, used this space for advertising like the following:

For Sale.

Bibles, Testaments, Spelling Books, Readers and Geographies, Atlases, Primers, Writing- paper, Inkstands, InkPowder, Slates, Pencils, Quills, Pen-knives, Wafers, Psalm Books, Writing Books, on the covers of which is printed a System of Writing.

There is a similar suggestion of primitiveness and rusticity in the way the publishers sometimes made known their location. Thus, at the foot of the titlepage of The American Grammar by Robert Ross, 1782, we find, "Hartford, Printed by Nathaniel Patten a few Rods North of the Court-Houfe " and on a New England Primer title-page of 1770, Boston, Printed and Sold by William M'Alpine,

HARTFORD:

PRINTED BY HUDSON AND GOODWIN.

Sold by them, at their Book-store, oppofite the North Meeting.
Houfe. By I. Beers, New-Haven. By B. Tallmadge & Co.
Litchfield, By T. C. Green, New-London; and by
Andrew Huntington, Norwich.

1802.

A Title-page Imprint.

From Dwight's A Short but Comprehensive System of the Geography of the World.

about Mid-way between the Governor's and Dr. Gardiner's in Marlborough Street."

The publishing was not by any means confined to the large cities. In New England, the chief source of school-book supply, every town of any consequence and enterprise seemed to have its textbook publishers. The compilers were very apt to put forth their books from the town where they lived. Thus, Hartford, which was the home of an unusual number of prolific text-book authors, was for a time the most important educational publishing centre in America.

A Fly-leaf Animal.

N

VII

NOAH WEBSTER AND HIS SPELLING-BOOK

OAH WEBSTER was born October 16, 1758, in Hartford, Connecticut, about three miles from the centre of the city. His father, Noah Webster, Sr., was a respectable farmer, a deacon in the church, and a justice of the peace. The boy worked on the home farm and attended the village school. When he had reached the age of fourteen, we find him beginning the study of the classics under the instruction of the parish clergyman, and two years later he was admitted to Yale College. The Revolutionary War seriously interrupted the college course, but he graduated with credit in 1778, and his father gave him an eight-dollar Continental bill, then worth about half its face value in specie, and told him he must henceforth rely on his own exertions.

It had been young Webster's intention to become a lawyer. The country, however, was impoverished by the war, and his first necessity was to make a living. So he resorted to school teaching. Pedagogy at that time was attended with unusual difficulties. Not only was the war still in progress, but the interruption of intercourse with Great Britain. had made school-books very scarce. The need of

a home source of text-book supply was evident, and in 1782, while in charge of a school in Orange County, New York, Webster compiled a spellingbook. This was printed at Hartford the next year

and gradually won very wide acceptance - so wide, indeed, that during the twenty years its author was engaged in preparing his dictionary, 1807 to 1827, the profits from that one little school-book furnished