There certainly were plenty of these humble little engines of instruction in America; old Judge Sewall had them for his fourteen children at the end of the seventeenth century, as we know from his diary; he wrote in 1691 of his son Joseph going to school "his cousin Jane accompanying him, carrying his horn-book." Waitstill Winthrop sent them to his little Connecticut Plantation nieces in 1716. It is told of one zealous Puritan minister that hating the symbolism of the cross he blotted it out of the criss-cross row of a number of hornbooks imported to Boston.
Back of Hornbook
"Gilt horns" were sold in Philadelphia with Bibles and Primers, as we learn from the Pennsylvania Gazette of December 4, 1760, and in New York in 1753, so says the New York Gazette of May 14, of that year. Pretty little lesson-toys, these gilded horns must have proved, but not so fine as the hornbooks of silver and ivory used by young misses of quality in England. Scores of pictures by seventeenth-century artists—on canvas and glass—show demure little maids and masters with hanging hornbooks. Even the pictures of the Holy Family show the infant Christ, hornbook in hand, tenderly taught by the Virgin Mother.
The hornbook was called by other names, horn-gig, horn-bat, battledore-book, absey-book, etc.; and in Dutch it was the a-b-boordje. They were worked in needlework, and written in ink, and stamped on tin and carved in wood, as well as printed, and Prior tells in rhyme of a hornbook, common enough in England, which must have proved eminently satisfactory to the student.
"To master John the English maid
A horn-book gives of gingerbread;
And that the child may learn the better,
As he can name, he eats the letter."
To this day in England, at certain Fairs and in Kensington bake-shops, these gingerbread hornbooks are made and sold in spite of the solemn warning of British moralists—"No liquorish learning to thy babes extend." Still
"All the letters are digested,
Hateful ignorance detested."
I have seen in New England what were called "cookey-moulds," which were of heavy wood incised with the alphabet, were of ancient Dutch manufacture, and had been used for making those "koeckje" hornbooks.