The corpus

The corpus we are working from comprises primers and readers, and information books from 1830 to 1960.

We have included material from the following collections and libraries:

  • the Renier Collection at the V & A
  • the Parker Collection at Birmingham City Reference Library
  • the British Library humanities and social sciences book collection
  • the collections at The University of Reading
  • Sue Walker's own collection

Material in the database has been selected to represent books used in schools (for example, as listed in Walter Low, A classified catalogue of school, college, technical and general educational works in use in Great Britain in the early part of 1871. London: Sampson Low, Son and Marston), and books published by key educational publishers such as Cassell, Blackie, Longman, Collins and Simpkin Marshall.

For our study of children's reading books we combined detailed numerical information about type size and line feed with data noting the presence or absence of a particular feature (such as infant characters). The features relevant to our description shown in this double-page spread from a reading book published around 1920 (top left) include:

  • typeface
  • the use of infant characters
  • amount of horizontal and vertical spacing
  • treatment of heading
  • picture/text relationship

For information books, such as the example to the bottom left we were less interested in details of typeface and type size, but more concerned with:

  • use of colours for illustrations
  • picture type
  • treatment of captions
  • text configurations
  • picture/text relationships
  • navigation features

Double-page spread from The songs the letters sing.
A preparator primer. London and Glasgow: The Grant Educational Company Ltd, nd, c. 1919, pp.18-19

This is an early example of the use of single storey a's and g's in a series of reading books for young children. The typeface bears similarities to several of the new 'old style' types that were issued from 1910 onwards by foundries such as Haddon, Stevens, and Shanks & Co, and is set in a large size with a generous amount of space between the lines. The very short heading (Rr) is set in the same typeface as the text, but in a larger size. The full colour, full-page picture on the left-hand pagee relates closely to the story beingtold on the facing page.

 

Double-page spread from D. Williams and W. Campbell, Easy lessons in nature study. London: Oxford University Press, 1939, pp. 56-7

This spread is typical of those from other information books from the 1930s. It is black and white throughout and used squared-up halftones for illustrations. These pictures do not relate directly to the text within the spread. Large amounts of continuous text predominate with the use of lists and sub-lists in the 'Things to do' section. The overall appearance of the spread suggests formality: headings and captions are centred and are in capitals, and the text is justified.