LINEN ABC BOOK FIRST STEPS. [19th century juvenile alphabet and vocabulary lesson book.]

Unpaged - 16 pages including covers. H 19.75cm x L 14.5cm. Printed entirely on limp linen cloth. Simple single-stitch binding, tan string looped through top left corners of book presumably original as it shows some age and fraying at ends, strong horizontal fold to book with some toning/foxing throughout. Covers heavily soiled with some staining, curling and creasing to cover corners, frayed threads along edges of covers as well as interior pages which too have some creased corners. Rear cover features a poem titled "Little Things" within an ornamental border. Front cover features an illustration of a small child on the right taking her first steps with arms outstretched to her seated mother on the left. Chicago's Newberry Library catalog cites their copy as having the same illustration but in black, white, and red; this copy's cover lacks the red and it seems unlikely that it ever had such a color application which corresponds to an online image of a copy owned by the Winterthur's Waldron collection showing the same two-tone mother-daughter illustration. The name "Howard Del" is printed at the bottom left corner of the front cover so perhaps he served as the illustrator. OCLC records several similarly titled books by different publishers but with various member libraries recording variations among cover illustrations, pagination, and content. This copy lacks a publishing date but, however, the Newberry catalog cites their 1899 McLoughlin Bros. edition as having the same pagination and content as opposed to their contrasting 1900 McLoughlin Bros. edition which has only twelve pages and shorter height dimension. The book was, of course, published as a child's alphabet book and reader. Pages 2-8 feature an alphabet of capital and lower case letters in black along center columns with adjacent right and left b/w woodblock style images phonetically associated with each letter, i.e. "A for Anvil," "D for Drum," "Q for Quill," "Z for Zebra," etc. Pages 9-15 feature twenty-five pronunciation and reading lessons. Only a good copy at best but still an intriguing and charming 19th century American juvenile educational reader and lesson book. Description copyright David Hallinan, Bookseller.…