New England Primer
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a famous first reader at one time popular in the colonies. It was compiled by Benjamin Harris, who, about 1690, abridged the New England Primer from an early work known as the Protestant Tutor. The Primer was bound originally in thin sheets of wood covered with paper. It was embellished with cuts and purported to be an easy and pleasant guide to the art of reading. It opened with a woodcut of "Good Boys at their Books," and an announcement that: He who ne'er learns his A, B, C, Forever will a Blockhead be. Then follow the capitals and the small letters. They are followed by easy syllables for children, as ab, eb, ib, and ba, be, bi; readily recognized as the forerunners of the old Webster Spelling Book. A few word lists of one, two, three, four, five, and six syllables respectively precede the Lord's Prayer and the Apostles' Creed . A few pages are occupied with pictures, one for each letter, an apple for A, a cat for C, an owl for O, a squirrel for S, a whale for W, etc. Moral announcements are not lacking such as: In Adams fall We sinned all. The idle fool Is whipped at school. Time cuts down all, Both great and small. Whales in the sea, God's voice obey. There are in all about three score small wood cuts with appropriate remarks and mottoes. Very crude the cuts seem now. A score or two of Scriptural quotations, Dr. Watts' Cradle Hymn, beginning, "Hush my dear, lie still and slumber," "Now I lay Me," and the Shorter Westminster Catechism, are included in the contents. It is estimated that no less than 2,000,000 copies of the Primer were sold in the eighteenth century. Possibly fifty copies are extant, representing forty editions. See Noah Webster
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 account still describes the book accurately, right down to "In Adam's fall We sinned all" and the rhymed alphabet, and Benjamin Harris is still the name usually attached to its origin around 1690. What has firmed up is how little of the early record survives: no copy of any seventeenth-century edition is known, and the earliest surviving complete copies date from the 1720s, so the 1690 first edition is known only from advertisements and later reprints. Aiton's guess of "possibly fifty copies extant" has been overtaken by more systematic bibliography and by library cataloguing; surviving copies are counted in the hundreds across many editions, and full facsimiles are now freely readable online. The Primer itself passed out of classroom use in the nineteenth century and is now studied as evidence about Puritan childhood and early American printing rather than read as a reader.
Written for this edition, 2026.