The American Spelling Book, 1783
In searching for Noah Webser’s "The American Spelling Book" I was directed to this site Nineteenth-Century American Children & What They Read
Among the many treasures there is Webster’s enomoursly popular speller, said to have sold a million copies a year in the 1850s, when the total US population was 23 million (Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, p. 80). Here’s the book in totality, with scanned images and OCR-ed text in HTML. I wish they’d been more sophisticated with PDF or other technologies, though.
The American Spelling Book, by Noah Webster ([1783] 1800?; 306kb)
Noah Webster was the man of words in early 19th-century America. Compiler of a dictionary which has become the standard for American English, he also compiled The American Spelling Book, which was the basic textbook for young readers in early 19th-century America. Before publication of this book in 1783, many schools used Thomas Dilworth’s A New Guide to the English Tongue. Webster’s book, with its polysyllabic words broken into individual syllables and its precepts and fables, became the favorite. Revised several times by Webster, as the "blue-backed speller" it taught generations of Americans how to read and how to spell.
The copy available here probably was printed in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1800. Unfortunately, it’s missing its frontispiece (a possibly libelous portrait of Noah Webster) and the bottom part of its title page. It’s available both as a transcription and as page images. Framed allows the viewer to see both the transcription and the pages images at once. Unframed allows the viewer to read the transcription, which has links to the images