Category Archives: Education and teaching

Martin Engelbrecht’s Kleines Bilder-Cabinet: An Early Polyglot School Book, the Gift of Pamela K. Harer

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The noted children’s book collector Pamela K. Harer was in friendly competition with Mr. Cotsen from the 1990s, when she was still practicing law in Southern California.  In spite of their rivalry, she gave Cotsen over fifty eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English, American, and French books, which were described in the “New and Notable” in the Autumn 2000 Princeton University Library Chronicle.  Downsizing for a move to Seattle in 2004 prompted a second gift, this time illustrated nineteenth-century pamphlets, the majority published by the Dean firm.

As a collector of 19th- and 20th-century children’s books, including early Soviet picture books and propaganda aimed at children produced between World Wars, early modern educational books were not a priority for Pamela.  However the first sale of her collection at PBA Auctions on November 6 2014 contained some choice hornbooks, a copy of the Mohawk Primer, and two editions of the Orbis Sensualium Pictus in the first She held back the Thomas Malin Rodgers copy of the Kleines Bilder-Cabinet zu Erlernüng Vier Sprachen (ca. 1740?) consisting of one hundred leaves of engraved plates, each with nine hand-colored images arranged in three rows of three, acquired at Bonham’s in 2012.  Knowing that Mr. Cotsen had slowly built up a cache of early modern books for teaching foreign languages, she thoughtfully presented this polyglot schoolbook to the collection this fall.

1a

Title page, Kleines Bilder-Cabinet zu Erlernüng Vier Sprachen. Augspurg: Martin Engelbrecht, [ca. 1740?] (Cotsen 21019). Gift of Pamela K. Harer

1b

Plate 24, Kleines Bilder-Cabinet zu Erlernüng Vier Sprachen (Cotsen 21019)

Martin Engelbrecht (1684-1756) was one of the most important engravers working in the Bavarian city of Augsburg, a major center for print production during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.   He is most famous for his engraved dioramas designed to be displayed as peepshows that are the forerunners of the nineteenth-century toy theater.  There isn’t much evidence in the  standard reference books on 18th century German-language children’s books that he was a major player in the juvenile book market.

Engelbrecht’s Kleines Bilder-Cabinet is a genuinely rare book, as is so often the case with school books. A quick search revealed that it survives in a copy of the forty-seven-leaf 1708 edition in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek and an undated one with ninety leaves in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Hague. Cotsen has an uncolored, undated copy of the one hundred leaves of plates in a somewhat later binding. Someone else is welcome to solve the little mystery I uncovered about it: another important Augsburg engraver, Johann Andreas Pfeffer, issued a book under the same title in 1734 and 1735 with what look like the same plates, but it has only ninety-six. There are copies at the University of Groningen, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the Staats- und Stadtbibliothek Augsburg, and the Getty Research Center in Los Angeles.

2c

The plate on the left is reproduced from the Pfeffer edition of the Kleines Bilder-Cabinet reproduced on p.58 of the exhibition catalog Deutsche Kinderbücher des 18. Jahrhunderts. Wolfenbüttel: Die Bibliothek, 1978, (Cotsen Reference Z1035.3 .D52). It faces the same plate in the uncolored copy of Engelbrecht edition (Cotsen 21019).

Given the interest in educational reform during the early modern period, I was curious how the Kleines Bilder-Cabinet would compare to others from the period, so I lined up some more polyglot school books on my desk.  The Kleines Bilder-Cabinet has been described as a picture dictionary, but that turns out to be something of a misnomer.  Here’s a contemporary example of a picture dictionary, Primitiva Latinae linguae, which was published by Peter Conrad Monath in Nurnberg in the 1730s.  It is quite easy to see that one book is an apple, and the other an orange.

3a

Title page, Primitiva latinae linguae. Nürnberg: Peter Conrad Monath, [1761] (Cotsen 1088)

3b

Page 1 and plate 1, Primitiva latinae linguae (Cotsen 1088)

In the Primitiva Latinae linguae, the vocabulary is arranged alphabetically by the Latin word, followed by its German and French equivalents. The words are numbered sequentially, so that it is easy to find the corresponding pictures on the plate opposite.   But there are more words on the page than there are illustrations on the plate.  Quite logically, the words that are unillustrated like “acerbus” and “adulter” are also unnumbered, so the student knows not to go hunting for a picture.   One of the students who owned the book made neat additions to text pages in the right hand and lower margins throughout the book.   So the Kleines Bilder-Cabinet really can’t be considered a pictionary, if only because the content isn’t arranged in alphabetical order. Only the name of the thing is provided, I suppose, because the picture makes a verbal description unnecessary.

And it’s not a direct descendant of Johann Amos Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus,  where the author gave considerable thought as to how to best visualize a thing, a category, a process, a concept, etc. and then provided a pithy description of the illustration in order to give the reader a clear idea of it. Comenius’ inspired pedagogy is nicely reflected in the section on the bedroom, where he succeeds in demonstrating how the objects’ interrelated functions are determined by their location in a particular space.

4a

Title page, (London : J. Kirton, 1659.) Orbis sensualium pictus, reproduced from Cotsen Ref LT101.C6 1659a. Orbis sensualium pictus. [Sydney]: Sydney University Press, 1967.

4d

Pages 148-9, Orbis sensualium pictus (Cotsen Ref LT101.C6 1659a)

And the Kleines Bilder-Cabinet isn’t a hybrid text like J. G. Seybold’s Teutsch-Lateinisches Worterbuchlein (Nurnberg: J. F. Rudiger, 1733), which is part dictionary, part encyclopedia.   Seybold classified some 6000 words into categories and each one is illustrated with a block about the size of a man’s thumbnail.  The page is laid out in six columns, three of images, and three of words, so a lot of information can be packed into a small page.  Even though it can be difficult to make out the thumbnails or read the words,  the page looks legible overall rather than cluttered because of all the white space.

5a

Title page, Teutsch=Lateinisches Wörterbüchlein zum Nutz und Ergötzung der Schul=Jugend…(Nürnberg): Johannis Friderici Rüdigeri, 1733. (Cotsen 90784)

5d

Pages 116-7, Teutsch=Lateinisches Wörterbüchlein (Cotsen 90784)

Where Comenius described the ship in a double-page spread illustrated with one block, Seybold offered the reader five pages covered with dozens of blocks showing all the ship’s parts.  The student who used Seybold would certainly acquire a much more extensive nautical vocabulary than he would from the Orbis Pictus, but it would come at the expense of a basic understanding of the interconnection of parts.

The Kleines Bilder-Cabinet represents yet another approach to impressing foreign-language vocabulary on school-boy brains. The model for the book may be a mid-seventeenth-century French work for teaching Latin, with which Engelbrecht might have been familiar: Louis Couvay’s set of plates based on the work of fifteenth century Belgian grammarian Johannes de Spater, Method nouvelle et tres-exacte pour enseigner et apprendre la premiere partie de Despautaire (1649).  Couvay was related to the engraver Jean Couvay, who executed the handsome plates. The volume was subsequently issued under the more pithy and accurate title, Le Despautaire en tables. It seems to have been in circulation until the 1700s, although it has to be said that the surviving copies are not easy to date with much precision.

The family resemblance between the two books isn’t hard to see. Each plate in Couvay is devoted to the particular Latin declension identified in the heading. The picture plane is divided into a grid and each box contains a small picture with a caption. Note that the size and number of the boxes varies considerably from leaf to leaf, as does the quantity and placement of explanatory text.

6a

Plate 14, Methodus nova et accurata docendi ac ediscendi Primam Despauterii [Paris: Jean Galliard, ca. 1649] (Cotsen 133)

6b

Plate 17, Methodus nova (Cotsen 133)

6c

Plate 49, Methodus nova (Cotsen 133)

Engelbrecht did not copy Couvay religiously, however, designing a regular grid of nine boxes all the same size. The plate has a heading for the Latin declension it illustrates, but no text beyond the captions.  Inside each box, the Latin word ought to come first, but perhaps because the book was produced in Germany, the German translation precedes it in large type, and after the Latin comes the French and Italian translations.  It’s hard to know if the change in order was confused or helped students, but it could have been dictated more by marketing than pedagogy.   Books or toys produced in Germany with polyglot texts — the content usually radically simplified to so that captions in three or four languages can be squeezed into a small space — I tend to regard as evidence for plans to distribute in German and abroad on the Continent.

7a

Plates 29 and 30, Kleines Bilder-Cabinet zu Erlernüng Vier Sprachen (Cotsen 21019). Gift of Pamela K. Harer.

Engelbrecht was not the only engraver who preferred a simpler layout: Nurnberg engraver Christoph Weigel stripped it down even more radically in the Neuer Lust-Weg.  Here the grids have just six boxes and they are large enough to allow for a clear and legible layout of the Latin, German, French, Italian captions within (the German words at the bottom of the boxes are written in Sutterlin script).  All attempt to integrate grammar and visuals has been abandoned and the pictures are arranged on the plates in random order.  While it makes for an undeniably attractive presentation, it is harder to imagine how the teacher used the book during lessons.

8a

Title page, Neuer Lust-Weg zum ziel nützlicher Künste und Wissenschaften Nürnberg: Christoph Weigel, [179-?] (Cotsen 86)

8d

Plates 60-1 Neuer Lust-Weg (Cotsen 86)

It struck me that the engraved grids in the Kleines Bilder-Cabinet, Couvay, and the Neuer Lust-Weg  resemble wall charts that have been  part of school room décor since the early nineteenth century. Or at least that is what histories of education that cover the subject tell us.  And I couldn’t help but notice that the Kleines Bilder-Cabinet and the Primitiva latinae linguae  both have frontispieces showing classrooms decorated with floor-to-ceiling grids of pictures. Could illustrations like these be one of the few sources we have for this alternative to wall charts?Somewhere has a school room wall decorated in this manner survived miraculously?

9c

On the left is the frontispiece for the Kleines Bilder-Cabinet zu Erlernung der Vier Sprachen (Cotsen 21019) and on the right is the frontispiece to the Primitiva latinae linguae (Cotsen 1088)

Should the these books I’ve been comparing in this post be thought of  as  collections of miniature charts that students could have at hand where ever they happened to be working on their lessons?  Of course such books have to have been expensive, but even so, would they have been accessible to more students than those fortunate enough to live where there were dedicated school rooms with painted walls, or walls hung with tables painted on fabric or glazed prints?

This attempt to learn more about Pamela’s gift turned out to be a fascinating exercise:  the descriptions in the Princeton on-line catalogue suggested that they all might be different attempts to further the pedagogy of visible language pioneered by Comenius, but it turns out that there was no consensus as to the best way to integrate the pictures with the text.  Different books offered different solutions to the very real problem of how to impress the thing, the word, and its representation on the student’s memory.

Pamela will not see this post. I’m sorry to have to close this with the sad news that the small world of American collectors of early children’s books was reduced and diminished by her death at age eighty-one in September 2014. Pamela was one of a kind and her sharp mind, engaging curiosity, and high energy will be missed.

Special thanks go to Pamela’s daughter Cynthia Gibbs and Pamela’s beloved husband of sixty-one years, W. Benson Harer MD, a distinguished collector in the field of Egyptology, for donating this splendid book to Cotsen as a final remembrance of Pam.

Benjamin and Pamela K. Harer

Benson and Pamela Harer

 

A is for Apple … Adam … King Alfred … Abolitionist…

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Alphabet Books: Some Variations on a Theme

The Pictured Alphabet, Front wrapper (Solomon King, ca. 1820) Cotsen new accession

The Pictured Alphabet (New York: Solomon King, ca. 1820) (Cotsen 153913)

Language—and how learning about language can be presented in children’s books—was on my mind this past week, while cataloging three new ABC books here at the Cotsen Library. Before I began working with Cotsen books, I would have said that books about language or the alphabet–especially children’s books–would have been more or less “content neutral.” After all, what could be more straightforward than teaching letters of the alphabet, syllables, short words, and basic reading, right?  Wrong…as I’ve discovered–and enjoyed discovering.  Since letters, syllables, and words may seem to be just there on the page, it’s easy to overlook how language acts as a provider of meaning(s), in addition to being a container for meaning.

The anti-slavery alphabet, (Belfast, Anti-Slavery Society, 1849) Cotsen new accession

The Anti-Slavery Alphabet, (Belfast: Anti-Slavery Society, 1849)
(Cotsen 153912)

But language is inherently charged with meaning, and its use full of cultural values and ideology, as various writers have observed. Language’s potential for both clarity or ambiguity can be used—or manipulated—by a writer or speaker.  Sometimes the way we use language is conscious and sometimes our use of language reflects our education, culture, and formative influences. Sometimes it’s both intended and unconscious.

In a book, meaning can also be shaped, extended, or modified by visual elements. This is particularly evident in children’s illustrated books, where the balance of text and illustrative elements can be more equal—or the visual can even take precedence over the text that it “accompanies.” Take early alphabet books, for instance. The New England Primer, the first primer (or ABC teacher and elementary reader) first issued in the United States in the 1670s, famously begins its alphabet rhymes with the verse:

In Adam's Fall... Detail (Cotsen 32844)

“In Adam’s Fall…” Detail
The New England Primer (Germantown: Christopher Sower, 1764) (Cotsen 32844)

New England Primer, First page of alphabet rhymes (Cotsen 32844)

New England Primer,
First page of alphabet rhymes (Cotsen 32844)

Accompanying this verse is a woodcut showing Adam and Eve standing under the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, apparently just before eating the apple. Apart from the mnemonic aspect of the rhyme itself–making it easy to remember (and recite)—the illustration complements the cautionary nature of the text in a pretty vivid way that likely stayed in young reader’s minds.

Language is being presented as more or less inseparable from religion and moral teaching: A is for Adam, the original co-sinner, for the eating of the Apple. Other illustrative examples in the Primer include Job, Queen Esther, and the whale that swallowed Jonah—along with a cat, a dog, and an “idle fool” with a dunce cap, everyday object-examples presumably readily accessible to children at the time. This is consistent with Locke’s recommended use of familiar, everyday objects—and pictures of them—as learning aids for educating children and for fixing concepts more vividly in their minds.

A is for Apple Aunt Lely's Picture Alphabet (McLougliin Bros., [between 1863 and 1866]) Cotsen 4393

“A is for Apple…”
Aunt Lely’s Picture Alphabet
(N.Y.: McLouglin Bros., [bet. 1863 and 1866]) (Cotsen 4393)

I’ve always found it interesting that some later alphabet books replace Adam with Apple. For a reader in this Age of Irony, it’s hard not to find this a little ironic, but it’s hard to tell if this would have seemed so to a nineteenth-century reader.  Perhaps it was ironic to some readers, but not to others. It’s always dangerous—although tempting—to view the past through the filter of our implicit present-day values and attitudes or to make sweeping, “historicizing” generalizations about what “everyone thought” at the time from our vantage-pont long after the original audience’s reception.

If nothing else, this change from Adam to Apple seemingly reflects an relatively increasing secularization in the mid-1800s, compared with the 1670s (nineteenth-century people were still generally religious, of course, but religion had been complemented, or diffused, by other spiritual and cultural influences).  Merely one of many ABC books using “A is for Apple” is McLoughlin Brothers’ Aunt Lely’s Picture Alphabet (New York, [between 1863 and 1866]).  McLoughlin Brothers, the preeminent American popular children’s book publisher of their time, was a master at providing books—and content—that people wanted to buy, so “marketability” must also have been at least a partial factor in the content they selected here.  Maybe fire and brimstone didn’t sell as well in the mid- and latter-1800s and early 1900s? Perhaps Apple was a little more “up-to-date” and familiar to children then too? Likely, some combination of all these factors factored into the text and illustration of this “A is for Apple” book.

From Apple to Apple Pie... Chromolithographed illustration from Aunt Lely's Picture Alphabet (McLougliin Bros., [between 1863 and 1866]) Cotsen 4393

From THE apple, to apples, to apple pie… Chromolithographed illustration from A, Apple Pie (London: Warne, & Co., [after 1885]) (Cotsen 31090)

Apples are also nicely colorful objects, suited to the sort of chromolithographed color illustration that McLoughlin pioneered in the mid- late-1800s. So printing technology would seem to have played a part in this changeover too. Even though Aunt Lely’s Alphabet (pictured above) doesn’t have colored illustrations, many of McLouglin’s books did, and you can readily imagine how strikingly visual the large apple shown in Aunt Lely’s Alphabet would be if it was colored in bright red. (Chromolithographs are often notable for their extra-vivid, slightly surreal colors.)  Sometimes, the Apple even found its way onto an apple pie, as in Warne’s A is for Apple Pie, thus moving us all the way from a cautionary Garden of Eden to a veritable kitchen cook-book.

Three Recently-cataloged Alphabet Books

The Alphabet Ladder, Frontispiece pastedown (G. Martin , [bet. 1817 and 1839]), new accession

The Alphabet Ladder, Frontispiece pastedown (London: G. Martin, [bet. 1817 and 1839]) (Cotsen 153911)

The Alphabet Ladder, or Gift for the Nursery (London, after 1817) provides a relatively early example of a colored alphabet book; it dates from some time after 1817 (when its publisher George Martin began publishing) and features hand- or stencil-colored engravings.

The front wrapper of this sixteen-page book has a paper onlay depicting a Britannia-like Fame (name printed on her shield) standing atop a structure of alphabet letters—the alphabet ladder, perhaps?—and some fashionably-dressed children (the target audience for this not inexpensive one shilling book?); the frontispiece-like front pastedown provides a similar illustration, a striking visual presentation, I think.  (Compare the illustration shown on the right with the cover label shown at the bottom of this posting.)

The letter A is illustrated here by a (boy-like) King Alfred, instead of by Adam or an Apple, an interesting complement to the Bullfinch pictured below, a bird that would probably have been familiar to a child-reader at the time.

A is for King Alfred, The Alphabet Ladder, (G. Martin , [bet. 1817 and 1839]), new accession

“A is for King Alfred,” The Alphabet Ladder, (G. Martin, [bet. 1817 and 1839]),
(Cotsen 153911)

English history is being used along with familiar objects perhaps to add a touch of history to visual examples making letters more vivid. Generally accepted as the first king of a united England, Alfred the Great would have a strong patriotic connotation to an English boy or girl, especially about this time, the era of the Napoleonic Wars, in which England and France of course figured large. So it’s not so very surprising that another illustrative colored engraving presents a sword-flourishing Frenchman, looking very much like Napoleon himself, complete with a bicorne hat tucked under his arm.  Parodic mockery of a vainglorious Napoleon was a staple of English satirists at the time and can be observed in a number of English children’s books.

Pictured above the Frenchman is a brightly-colored Egg Plum, another object familiar to children, as was the Bullfinch. This juxtaposition of historical personages and everyday items or animals may seem a bit strange to us now.

F is for Frenchman, The Alphabet Ladder, Cotsen new accession

“F is for Frenchman…”
The Alphabet Ladder, (Cotsen 153911)

But such combinations are not all the unusual in children’s ABCs, and it was also quite common for a publisher to “update” a book with some “new” or topical illustrations or textual content. A quick and dirty way to provide a “revised edition” perhaps and encourage some new sales? And what better way to entice a young reader than blatantly patriotic and relevant contemporary examples in wartime?  Offhand, I’d say that The Alphabet Ladder—and it’s illustrative examples—would appeal more to a boy that a girl; apart from the warlike soldiers, almost all of the children pictured inside the book are boys—adding an interesting gendered aspect to the  presentation of the actual alphabet, which is belied by the cover and frontispiece featuring two boys and two girls.

We find a similar juxtaposition of commonplace illustrative examples and patriotic ones in another new Cotsen title: Solomon King’s: The Pictured Alphabet (New York, ca. 1820). K is for Kite, another familiar object to a child then, but N is for…Napoleon, somewhat surprisingly perhaps in an American book of the time.

K is for Kite, N is for Napoleon, The Pictured Alphabet, (Solomon King, 1820) Cotsen new accession

K is for Kite, N is for Napoleon,
The Pictured Alphabet, (New York: Solomon King, ca. 1820)
(Cotsen 153913)

Another pair of facing illustrative wood-engravings shows a Dunce to illustrate the letter D and a Guard the letter G, the latter looking distinctly English (and I think grenadier guards were generally a European type of soldier).

D is for Dunce, G is for Guard, The Pictured Alphabet, (Solomon King, ca. 1820) Cotsen new accession

D is for Dunce, G is for Guard,
The Pictured Alphabet,
(Cotsen 153913)

Yet another pair of illustrations shows a tankard—Quenching thirst, I guess—to illustrate the letter Q, which faces the letter T’s Trumpet, here having been affixed with the letters “US,” adding both a topical and patriotic military touch to the American publication.  (And while a tankard was more of an all-purpose drinking cup in 1820 then than it is now, the association with beer and ale must have been apparent when this book was published.  Imagine a children’s alphabet featuring anything like a beer mug now!)

Q is for Quench, T is for Trumpet The Pictured Alphabet, (Solomon King, ca. 1820) Cotsen new accession

Q is for Quench, T is for Trumpet,
The Pictured Alphabet,
(Cotsen 153913)

Some of these combinations suggest that the printing blocks may have either come from Europe, or been adaptations of European ones; 1820 is relatively early in American printing and publishing development, with type and book-printing blocks still often being imported from Europe rather than being manufactured domestically. King’s book is a fairly simple production—even a somewhat primitive one—small in size (just 3 ½ inches tall) with simple illustrations and no text other than the alphabet letters themselves; after all, it is a one penny book, as the publisher’s advertisement on the lower wrapper tells us. (In contrast, the relatively deluxe Alphabet Ladder has a cover price of a full English shilling for the “coloured” version.)  But The Pictured Alphabet is also quite a rare book now, no copy other than Cotsen’s being found in OCLC’s combined libraries catalog.  Sometimes, cheap books in wrappers must have been used and then discarded once their condition deteriorated—unlike more expensive books, which were often more likely to be retained.

And they sighed by reason of their bondage... The Anti-Slavery Alphabet, Cotsen new accession

“And they sighed by reason of their bondage…”
Title page vignette The Anti-Slavery Alphabet, (Belfast, Anti-Slavery Society, 1849)
(Cotsen 153912)

"For indeed, I was stolen out of the land," The Anti-Slavery Alphabet, (Belfast, Anti-Slavery Society, 1849) Cotsen new accession

“For indeed, I was stolen out of the land,”
Vignette on title page verso
The Anti-Slavery Alphabet, (Belfast, Anti-Slavery Society, 1849)
(Cotsen 153912)

Another intentionally topical alphabet book—and one with a clearly moral didactic goal—is the Anti-Slavery Society’s: The Anti-Slavery Alphabet (Belfast, 1849). Apart from the very title and didactic approach of the text, there’s a striking wood-engraved title-page vignette depicting a slave sale, and another illustration on the verso side depicting a slave telling a seated white man and woman: “For indeed I was stolen out of the land.”

Even without the caption text beneath them, these two illustrations make their meaning clear. These illustrations are the only ones in this twelve-page book, somewhat unusual for the time perhaps, and the gathering of printed pages comes within plain paper wrappers with no text, advertising, or illustration on them. Perhaps this is a function of cost? Or perhaps the publisher like the Anti-Slavery Society didn’t think that such “marketing” aspects were appropriate (or needed) for a book presumably sold or given away by/to people of strong conviction? These conjectures are just a couple of the possible explanations.

A is for Abolitionist... The Anti-Slavery Alphabet, (Belfast, Anti-Slavery Society, 1849) Cotsen new accession

A is for Abolitionist…
The Anti-Slavery Alphabet,
(Cotsen 153912)

But the four-line alphabet rhymes for each alphabet letter speak compellingly to the book’s underlying moral purpose: to teach children about the evils of slavery and move them to moral awareness, in part by making them aware of their own potential complicity for enjoying sweet treats made from slave-produced sugar. Apart from the A,B,C rhymes pictured at right, some other verses read:

I is the Infant, from the arms
Of its fond mother torn,
And, at a public auction, sold
With horses, cows, and corn.

S is the Sugar, that the slave
Is toiling hard to make,
To put in your pie and tea,
Your candy, and your cake.

U is for Upper Canada,
Where the poor slave has found
Rest after all his wanderings
For it is British ground!

Why “Upper Canada” and “British ground”?  While this book may seem directed at American audiences, it was printed in Belfast, Ireland. Escaped slaves often tried to reach Canada, via the Underground Railroad and other means, because slavery had been outlawed in most of the British Empire by the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.  Canada was then part of the British Empire, and Upper Canada was the area what we now know as Southern Ontario, bordering New York State (Lower Canada being Quebec).

So, looking at this batch of three new Cotsen alphabet books, I think we can understand some of the many, wide-ranging “educational” goals that ABC books subserved, teaching language mechanics being just one.

Three Recently-cataloged Cotsen Library Alphabet Books Cotsen new accessions

Three Recently-cataloged Cotsen Library Alphabet Books
Cotsen new accessions