[McGuffey's Eclectic Primer (Cincinnati, 1849), title page, showing child playing with A,B,C]

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McGuffey's Eclectic Primer, printed in Cincinnati in 1849, opens with a woodcut title page showing a child at play with the letters of the alphabet. The McGuffey readers were compiled by William Holmes McGuffey, a Presbyterian minister and professor who taught at Miami University in nearby Oxford, Ohio, and they were issued by Cincinnati publishers whose presses turned the city into a major center of schoolbook printing in the mid-nineteenth century. Because the primers were used in classrooms across much of the country for generations, this small illustration of a child learning letters through play offers a useful glimpse into how early American schooling presented reading to young children.

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