A History of the McGuffey Readers

by Henry Hobart Vail

In some of these books the retail price is printed. In 1844 the retail price of the First Reader was twelve and a half cents. It contained 108 pages. In the same year, the Second Reader of 216 pages was priced at 25 cents. The Fourth Reader cost 75 cents, and contained 336 pages.

These prices were in a market when the day's wage of a laboring man was only fifty cents. Relatively to the cost of other articles, schoolbooks were not nearly so cheap as they are now.

When Truman & Smith began publishing, the copyright law required the deposit of titles and copies of the several books in the office of the Clerk of the District Court. At first such deposits were made in Columbus, Ohio, but later in Cincinnati. When Congress organized the Copyright Bureau in Washington, the several clerks were required to send to the Library of Congress all the sample copies deposited; but these had been carelessly kept and many were lost. A duplicate set was for years required to be sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. These were also passed into the custody of the Librarian of Congress; but this collection had been carelessly preserved and the files of the McGuffey Readers at Washington are now quite defective for the earliest issues. The Library seems to have no copy of any number of the first edition except possibly the Second and Fourth. The copy of the Second was deposited December 12, 1836. The Fourth bears date of July, 1837. All the other early copies found in that library are of later dates and are "Revised and Improved."

It may be well to indicate in a general way the progress that has been made in illustrating schoolbooks. The first editions of the McGuffey Readers as issued in 1836 and 1837 did not contain a single original engraving. All seem to have been copied from English books. The nice little boys wear round-about jackets with wide, white ruffled collars at the neck. The proper little girls have scoop bonnets and conspicuous pantalets. Most of the men wear knee breeches. The houses shown have the thatched roofs of English cottages. In one picture a boy has a regular cricket bat. Other schoolbooks of that date show similar appropriations of English engravings; but even at that time there were a few wood engravers in America. When the second general revision was made in 1843 some original illustrations appeared and in the edition of 1853 notice was given on the title page that the engravings were copyright property that must not be used by others.

As pictures are closely studied by children, some of the users of these early books may remember the cut showing vividly the dangers of "whale catching." Two boats are thrown high in the air by one sweep of the animal's tail and one seaman is shown head downward still in the boat. Another represented Jonah being cast overboard from the ship toward the whale below whose mouth is manifestly large enough to accommodate Jonah.

But the engravings in this edition of 1853 had no considerable artistic quality and they were very coarsely engraved. In 1863 came the first employment of a genuine artist in wood engraving. This was Mr. E.J. Whitney who had made a reputation by work done for New York publishers. His engravings were to take the place of some then in the books and their sizes were precisely determined. The drawings were most carefully made by Mr. Herrick with pencil on the whitened boxwood blocks, and sent to the publisher for examination. These, when approved, were returned to the engraver who followed precisely the lines of the drawing. When the engraving was finished, a carefully rubbed proof on India paper was sent to the publisher. If this was satisfactory, the block was delivered and from it an electrotype was made for printing. The block itself was preserved as an original. Mr. Whitney's work was thoroughly good. He was a wood engraver of the old school.

When the revision of 1878 was decided on, the publishers of the McGuffey Readers realized that much improvement must be made in the illustrations. About this time the magazines were placing great stress upon pictorial work and a new school of engravers came into existence. The wood engravers had already departed from the painful reproduction of each line of a pencil drawing and had become skilled in representing tints of light and shade if placed on the whitened block with a brush. This gave greater freedom of interpretation to the engraver. The next step was to have the drawing made large and reproduced on the block by photography. By this method most of the engravings were made for the edition of 1878. Care was taken to employ artists of reputation and the engravings were usually signed by the artist and by the engraver.

Before the last edition came out in 1901, photo-engraving had nearly supplanted wood engraving. By this process the artist's drawing with the brush is reproduced in fine tints which, when well engraved and carefully printed, produce effective results. Pen and ink drawings are also reproduced in exact facsimile. By this process the hand work of the engraver is nearly eliminated. The blocks are sometimes retouched to produce effects not attained by the process work. The skill of the artist in making the drawing thus becomes all important.

The introduction of color work in the schoolbooks intended for young children resulted from the invention of the three-color plates. From nature, or from a colored painting, three photographs are taken—one excluding all but the yellow rays of light, one for the red rays, and one for the blue. From these photographs three tint blocks are made which to the eye in many cases look exactly alike. From one of these an impression is made with yellow ink, exactly over this the red plate prints with red ink and this is followed by an impression from the blue plate. If the effects of the color screens of the camera are exactly reproduced by the printer's inks and with exactly the right amount of ink, the result is wonderfully satisfactory.

What are the qualities in these McGuffey Eclectic Readers that won for them through three-quarters of a century such wide and constant use?