The New-England primer enlarged. For the more easy attaining the true reading of English. To which is added, the Assembly of divines catechism

Narrator: The New-England primer enlarged. 1727. Printed book. Just under 4 inches high by about 5 inches wide, when displayed open.

This is a pocket-sized children’s textbook in a brown cover. The pages are of off-white paper, with text and illustrations in black.

The book will be shown open at a variety of different pages during the run of the exhibition, but the general layout is: On the left-hand page is a list of words, set out alphabetically in two columns. Each word appears twice. The first time, in the left-hand column, it is broken down by dashes into syllables. Next to it, in the right-hand column, the word is written again, without the dashes.

Facing the lists, on the right-hand page, are the letters of the alphabet with small illustrations enclosed in boxes and an accompanying two-line rhyme. For example, against the letter A is a picture of a figure picking an apple from a tree, with the lines, “In Adam’s Fall, We Sinned All.” Below it is the letter B, with a box enclosing a picture of the Bible, with the rhyme, “Thy Life to Mend, This Book Attend.” And so on.

Interpretive commentary follows.

Anna Deavere Smith: The small volume before you is nearly 300 years old. It’s extraordinarily rare today. But that wasn’t the case in the 1700s. Curator of Rare Books Michael Inman:

Michael Inman: It was something that virtually every young child in British North America—certainly in the Puritan colonies in New England—would have had access to and owned a copy of. It was the schoolbook, essentially, of its day for those young children.

Anna Deavere Smith: First printed in Boston around 1690, The New-England Primer combined reading instruction with Christian catechism.

Michael Inman: So you'll find in the work spelling lessons, for example. But those spelling lessons are couched within simple lessons of Puritan theology.  

The copy on display here in the exhibition gallery is the only known surviving copy of the 1727 edition, which is the earliest dated edition of The New-England Primer to survive.

So it's a treasure for that reason.

Anna Deavere Smith: Miraculously, even its original wood and sheepskin binding survives. But this book’s rarity isn’t the only reason it’s significant.

Michael Inman: The New-England Primer, to my mind, symbolizes the importance that was placed on education and literacy by the Puritans of New England. And, somewhat later, the importance that was placed on the concepts of freely available information, freedom of expression, freedom of the press. And all of those ideas and concepts fed into the revolutionary impulse that gave rise to the United States, just a matter of decades later.