So I saw this on Facebook Marketplace, and it jogged my memory. These were the primers we found up in the attic that I taught myself to read at age three from (obviously from the lower grades). I'd forgotten what they were called, just that they predated the
Dick and Jane books. 120 million copies of
McGuffey's Readers were sold between 1836 and 1960, per the
National Park Service. They're still popular in homeschooling, because their stories are drawn from the Bible (and other classical sources), often with morals.
Bringing the third-grade reader to show-and-tell and reading from it in first grade is what got me skipped up a grade (they wanted to skip me up two; thankfully, my mom said no, one was enough of a challenge, being the youngest kid in class. Just because you're gifted doesn't mean you're good at everything. They were practically trying to teach me to multiply before I had addition down. Cool to see these, though.
[UPDATE: Every single one of them (The
McGuffey's Eclectic Primer through the
Sixth Eclectic Reader, plus the
Eclectic Spelling Book) is available in .EPUB and other formats on
Project Gutenberg, meaning they can be
sent to a Kindle or be read on a Nook or Kobo. I just sent them to my Kindle Scribe. There is much happiness here now. You can find them
here. All but the 2nd and 5th readers are also in .PDF (not sure why they're not), so they can be printed.]
