The Hornbook and the First Classroom Page
One leaf, one board, and the whole of a child's first year of reading.
Department front
Textbooks
How the book that a class works from is chosen, printed, priced and replaced.
Lead article
How the Schoolbook Became Standard
From the master's single copy to a book in every pupil's hands.
For most of the history of formal teaching, the book belonged to the teacher. A school might hold one copy of a grammar or a psalter, and the lesson was the process of getting the contents of that copy into thirty heads by voice and repetition. Pupils copied, recited and were corrected. The book was a master text, not a personal possession, and the idea that every child in a room might turn to the same page at the same moment would have seemed extravagant.
What changed that was not a single invention but a slow alignment of three things: a cheaper sheet, a stable text and an institution large enough to order in quantity.
Printing lowered the cost of a copy, but not immediately to the level of a classroom. The expensive part of a book has usually been the paper, not the impression, and paper made from rag stock remained a limited commodity. The nineteenth-century shift to wood-pulp paper and to machine production changed the arithmetic. A publisher could now think in editions of tens of thousands rather than hundreds, and could set a price that a school board rather than a wealthy family might pay.
More in this department
Graded Readers and the Idea of a Series
When a book stopped being one book and became a number in a sequence.