McGuffey Reader

September 23rd is the anniversary of the birth of William Holmes McGuffey who was born on Sept. 23, 1800. He was an American professor and college president who is best known for writing the McGuffey Reader. He was born near Claysville in Washington Co., Penn. While a professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio he created the first of a series of McGuffey Reader which taught generations of children to read. It is estimated that at least 122 million copies of the McGuffey Reader were sold between 1836 and 1960.

The books started a young child with easy reading lessons and then the lessons progressively got more difficult. The first of the series taught reading by using the phonics method, while second book taught students  to the understand the meaning of sentences.

View the first McGuffey Reader (in many formats) on Archive.org.