CHAPTER V
HORNBOOK AND PRIMER
To those who are in years but Babes I bow
My Pen to teach them what the Letters be,
And how they may improve their A. B. C.
Nor let my pretty Children them despise.
All needs must there begin, that would be wise,
Nor let them fall under Discouragement,
Who at their Hornbook stick, and time hath spent,
Upon that A. B. C, while others do
Into their Primer or their Psalter go.
—A Book for Boys and Girls, or Country Rhimes for Children. John Bunyan, 1686.
The English philosopher, John Locke, in his Thoughts concerning Education, written in 1690, says the method of teaching children to read in England at that time was always "the ordinary road of Horn-book, Primer, Psalter, Testament, and Bible." These, he said, "engage the liking of children and tempt them to read." The road was the same in New England, but it would hardly be called a tempting method.
The first book from which the children of the colonists learned their letters and to spell, was not really a book at all, in our sense of the word. It was what was called a hornbook. A thin piece of wood, usually about four or five inches long and two inches wide, had placed upon it a sheet of paper a trifle smaller, printed at the top with the alphabet in large and small letters; below were simple syllables such as ab, eb, ib, ob, etc.; then came the Lord's Prayer. This printed page was covered with a thin sheet of yellowish horn, which was not as transparent as glass, yet permitted the letters to be read through it; and both the paper and the horn were fastened around the edges to the wood by a narrow strip of metal, usually brass, which was tacked down by fine tacks or nails. It was, therefore, a book of a single page. At the two upper corners of the page were crosses, hence to read the hornbook was often called "reading a criss-cross row." At the lower end of the wooden back was usually a little handle which often was pierced with a hole; thus the hornbook could be carried by a string, which could be placed around the neck or hung by the side.
