McGuffey’s Readers

The essay written by Barbara Smith Palmer (“Proposed: a Literary Canon for All,” Voices, Jan. 8) gladdened my heart as I read it. She is a very wise lady. Would that she were my friend!

I hope her essay was read by many people, especially our educators. Now I must finish reading the two first editions of McGuffey’s Readers, the Eclectic Fourth Reader and the Eclectic Fifth Reader, that have been in my possession for a number of years.

Written, in a child’s script, is the name “Lewis H. Muinch, Starkcounty, Ohio, 1870,” in the fourth reader. In the fifth reader is written “Miss Clementine Muinch, Stark Co., Ohio. Jan. 1865,” and there are pencil drawings of a boy and a girl dressed in the style of the day. These two books bear silent witness to these two children, evidently brother and sister, who were privileged to have been taught in this way.

DORIS E. GILL

Phelan