Tower’s English Grammar
The most prolific collector of American textbooks, John A. Nietz, asserted in 1961 that: “every one who can read has studied some textbooks.” Surely some readers, especially those who weren’t allowed access to formal schooling, learned to read from other books. But, there’s no denying the enormous influence that schoolbooks have on publishing as a whole; they account for a little more than half of the industry’s total revenue in the United States.
Nietz amassed nearly 20,000 schoolbooks, which he donated to the University of Pittsburgh where they’re now easily accessible online. I have only a tiny fraction of this number in my collection, but textbooks make up a large percentage of the whole. I think of textbooks as a kind of compulsory collection. They do not reveal a reader’s great passions or personality: except in the margins, in the endpapers, and in the things they’ve left behind.
Walter Benjamin, my patron saint of unpacking, confessed: “The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership — for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.”
Benjamin’s ambivalence about technological reproduction is not yet palpable. In his later ‘Work of Art’ essay, mechanical copies bring unique artworks closer to “the masses.” The special historical quality of art objects is sacrificed in favor of access. But here he is in 1931, in his library, late at night, testifying to the singularity of books, which are the products of technological reproduction par excellence. He admits: “not only books but also copies of books have their fates.” This is the “aura” working its magic.
Schoolbooks were designed to create a nation of readers. In the Colonial Era, separated from their birthplaces and their sovereign, being able to read letters and laws was a necessity for English colonists. They brought schoolbooks with them. Education, as Edward Said argues, is very much part of the colonial project. When a printing press arrived on the shores of New England, the first book printed on it was the Bay Psalm Book. The press was shipped to the Massachusetts Bay Colony by a Puritan minister, Joseph Glover. When he died during his 1638 transatlantic crossing, ownership of the press was transferred to his wife, Elizabeth. Not long after the 1640 psalter, Elizabeth Glover’s Press reportedly printed “A Spelling Book,” although it was likely based on English precedent.
Noah Webster published the country’s first textbook designed for American schoolchildren more than a century later, in 1783. He called it (on the advice of a Yale professor): A Grammatical Institute of The English Language, Comprising an Easy, Concise, and Systematic Method of Education, Designed for The Use of English Schools in America. They were commonly referred to as the “blue-backed spellers,” for the color of their bindings. Webster lived off the proceeds of his textbook sales while writing his dictionary.
Part I, Containing a New and Accurate Standard of Pronunciation, is understood as Webster’s “speller,” but I’m drawn to it for its pronunciation guide. American pronunciation diverged from its British forebears and Webster wrote schoolbooks to reflect (and produce) this emerging national identity. But, how to move from print on a page to words on the tongue?
As a child of the Northeast with ties to New England and upstate New York, I know that the sound of my full first name changes from one place to the next. (Say it to yourself: Kimberly. Now say it like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting.) From the front cover of Tower’s English Grammar, I learn that John Henry Eames studied using this book in Thompson, Connecticut. How did his name sound in that classroom? Did it change when he moved to Ashland, Massachusetts?
Tower’s English Grammar, like most textbooks of its era, taught teachers while they taught pupils. Prior to the widespread establishment of normal schools, which trained future teachers, many instructors had no more education than their most advanced students. Reading through the “Gradual Lessons in English Grammar” is like reading a playscript: everyone played a part.
Was this book a magic encyclopedia for John Henry? Did he thrill to see his name in print on its pages? Did the book enlarge his world to the places named, some which he may have visited, others that he’d only dreamt about?
These books still exist, though John Henry does not. The book is a chalk tracing around what he might have been. Who is outside that circle, the many children who could not write their names in books? One impressed her name on the flyleaf, though without ink: Mary Angel.
Let the pupil point out the verbs expressing existence, and those expressing action.
am, play, desire, stand,
ride, walk, believe, sit,
give, live, exist, begin,
will talk, might have been,
could have been loved.
