If the geographers drew upon their imaginations when describing the physical features of the country, so also did the statesmen. That great apostle of democracy, Thomas Jefferson, sent a communication to Congress after the Louisiana Purchase, conveying what he considered good information about the new possession. The most curious statement in this strange document was about the mountain of salt. He informed Congress that this mountain was said to be 180 miles long, 45 miles wide, and all of white, glittering salt, with salt rivers flowing from cavities at the base. In all probability Lewis and Clark disillusioned Mr. Jefferson in 1806, when they returned from their trip to the Pacific coast and gave accurate descriptions of the country they had traversed.
The first English Grammar written in America was prepared by Professor Jones, a mathematical professor, as Dr. Chandler tells me, at William and Mary College. This book was written about 1703 and was printed in London. Only one copy of this grammar is now known, and that is contained in a London collection. Another book was prepared by Caleb Bingham, the first edition of which was printed in 1799. It was called The Young Lady’s Accidence. This was the first English Grammar used in the Boston schools. Its only predecessor used in this country was Part II of Webster’s Grammatical Institute.
Lindley Murray left his native country and settled in England in 1784. The following year he wrote and published in England his Grammar of the English Language. This Grammar was the standard textbook for fifty years throughout England and America.
The illustrations in the early schoolbooks were as bad or worse than the text matter. They were not only entirely lacking in artistic quality, but, worse than that, they frequently pictured horrible things that the child during his school day had constantly under his observation. What twentieth century publisher would dare to use illustrations in Readers, Geographies, or any other textbooks, picturing the burning of an unfortunate victim at the stake, a widow burning on the funeral pyre of her husband, or the bloody details of an Indian massacre? And yet these awful things are pictured in a Geography not yet a hundred years old.
Nearly all the books that appeared prior to 1840 were printed from type, for neither the stereotype nor the electrotype plate was in use before that time. Dr. Vail tells us that the early editions of the McGuffey Readers, copyrighted, as I have said, in 1836 and 1837, were so printed. The type impressions of the limited editions were clear and distinct for the most part. Whether these impressions would have been clear had as large and as many editions been printed from standing type as we now print from plates, is of course a matter of conjecture.
It is not necessary to remind you that publishers may to-day furnish a duplicate set of plates to any concern on earth desiring to reproduce one of their books, and that the book may be reprinted by the purchaser without the bother and expense of resetting the type; but the printer of the early days was not so fortunate, for if a concern in New York wished to reprint and sell a book originally printed in Boston, he was obliged to reset it, taking as copy the Boston production.
You remember that stereotyping was not perfected by Stanhope until 1800, and that stereotype plates were not used in the manufacturing of schoolbooks until a later date, but that they were commonly used before electrotyping came into general use about 1860, though the Harpers used electrotyping in 1840 to duplicate wood cuts; that wood engraving was used in Europe in 1830, but much earlier in China; that copper engraving was used as early as 1450; that steel engraving was invented by Perkins, of Newburyport, Mass., in 1814; that the three-color process plate was first made by Frederick Ives of Philadelphia in 1881, but that the development of color work in schoolbooks has been within the last forty years.
You recall the fact that the Adams or flat press was largely used until 1875; that the first flat-bed cylinder press used in America was a Napier brought from England in 1825; that in 1860 William Bullock began to experiment on a rotary self-feeding or web printing press, and finally achieved success in 1865. The web rotary press, as we know, can turn out about ten times as much work in a given time as the flat-bed cylinder press. Considering the fact that many millions of textbooks are now printed annually, requiring the service of high power rotary presses to print their sheets in season for use, is it not indeed fortunate for the educational world that human skill has perfected such a really wonderful instrument as this great machine, so splendidly equipped for the accomplishment of this gigantic task?
The binding of books until a comparatively recent date was entirely done by hand. The process was so slow that only a few books could be bound in a day, even by the largest establishment. Folding machines were not used by binders until 1875, rounding and backing machines until about 1888, sewing machines and case-making machines until about 1890, gathering machines until about 1895, casing-in machines until about 1900. It is well known to you that a modern bindery in which up-to-date machinery is installed is able to produce per day from 20,000 to 60,000 three-hundred-page sewed books of octavo size. It is therefore evident that there has been as wonderful an improvement in the method of binding books in the last century as in the method of printing them, and that the output of a modern bindery is now so enormous that it would have made the heads of the early hand binders dizzy just to think of it.
The New England Primer was, of course, bound by hand. Its covers were of thin oak that cracked and splintered badly with use, in spite of the coarse blue paper that was pasted over the wood. The back was of leather. Neither back nor sides had any printing on them. Yet, despite its ugly appearance, this book has had a sale of at least two million copies since Harris first printed it in or before 1691.