History of the horn-book / by Andrew W. Tuer.

  • Tuer, Andrew White, 1838-1900.
Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: History of the horn-book / by Andrew W. Tuer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    31/538 (page 5)
    While kindly placing at my disposal advance slips relating to the horn¬ book, gathered together for that student’s treasure-house of the English language, the New English Dictionary^ Dr. J. A. H. Murray writes from Oxford : “ As references become suddenly plentiful at the end of the sixteenth century, it looks as if the word could not be much older, or as if the thing came in about that time.” The truth probably is that the horn-book was invented at an earlier period than this, but that it was not generally used until towards the close of the sixteenth century. The earliest record I can find of a real horn-book faced with horn and not a mere alphabetical tablet—more will be said about early horn-books in later pages—is about 1450. No written, and very few of the earliest printed, horn-books have been preserved, and those left to us have suffered more or less from the effects of wear and tear, and dirt and damp. The earliest printed horn-books were bulkier than their successors, and'were in black letter, but Roman was probably used almost as soon as it was introduced in 1467. Black and Roman type ran side by side until the clearness and legibility of the latter almost entirely drove its elder brother out of the field of letters. The earliest horn-books or tablets—in some the letters were incised on the wood, in others they were written—had nothing but the alphabet. Devotional booklets for children, opening with the ABC, followed, and the alphabet horn-book and the little ABC books of prayers ran side by side. Then the horn-book itself assumed the devotional form it has since retained, the earliest examples in Latin emanating from the Romish Church. About the time of the Reformation we get the horn-book—of which there were many variants—in its English form. An old writer—I cannot lay hands on the reference—says that the horn-book is called a horn-book because the back was first ornamented with a rough cut representing an animal’s horn, probably next to the reed the earliest wind instrument known to man. A horn-book was so called simply because the printed sheet was protected against grubby fingers by a sheet or thin slab of horn, through which the letters could be read. The captious might say that a horn-book without horn cannot be a horn-book. But with the public a horn-book gradually came to mean an alphabetical tablet of any kind whether horn entered into the construction