Young American Readers is AN EXHIBITION drawn from the first of several donations to the Kenneth Spencer Research Library from Charles and E. Jennifer Monaghan, of Brooklyn, N. Y., that over the course of the next few years will total about 1,400 volumes. The books have been designated the Charles and E. Jennifer Monaghan Collection. With its focus on the teaching of reading and writing in Colonial America and the United States, the Monaghan Collection complements and extends the Spencer Library's already substantial holdings in this field. This library holds many similar volumes—books from this state and region of the United States, in the Kansas Collection—and books from across the seas, especially from Britain, in the Department of Special Collections. Now, much strengthened by the Monaghans' gift, these collections give the Spencer Library the opportunity to support in great depth those faculty and students who seek to learn about a most important part of the history of education . . . and to offer some delight to anyone who may wonder how our forebears learned to read!

Charles Monaghan describes how the Monaghan Collection began: "We started acquiring pieces for our collection in 1975. Jennifer had undertaken to write a thesis on Noah Webster's spelling book, and had been looking at the textbooks written by his rivals. This made us aware of a wonderful, virtually unexamined universe of material. The first book we bought was a battered copy of a reader by Charles Sanders, which cost us five cents. Low prices were an inducement to collect old literacy textbooks. Since they were undervalued in the academic community, they were also undervalued in the market. The most we ever spent on a single copy was $75, for an old Webster speller with a woodcut of the author in it. "As part of her research over the next two decades, Jennifer spent a lot of time at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. As the years passed, she really became an expert in old literacy textbooks. In conjunction with trips to Massachusetts, we would visit book barns and antiquarian bookstores there, and also in upstate New York, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. After each trip, we would come home with dozens of acquisitions. I began to keep track of our purchases on the computer, so we were soon traveling with a computerized list, which cut down on the number of duplicates that we were buying. "At the time, I was working as a freelance travel writer. This took me on trips around the country. I would always visit the antiquarian bookstores in the area I was visiting, bringing along my updated computerized list. I found the bookstores by consulting the yellow pages in each area, under the listing 'Books, Used and Antiquarian.' I made numerous purchases of old textbooks in important publishing towns such as Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, but also in other cities, including New Orleans, Phoenix and St. Petersburg. I also attended book fairs and made buying trips. "Family members and friends picked up on our enthusiasm for old textbooks, and we would occasionally receive a copy for a birthday or Christmas present, but nearly all the books were collected by ourselves. "We gradually acquired some 1,800 books. They have been stored in every nook and cranny of our house. I sorted out the oldest and most delicate books, which we stored in their own bookcase in Jennifer's study. In our basement, we made a space to store the large number of textbooks written in the late 19th and early 20th century by women authors. Jennifer used this part of our collection as the basis for an article she did on women textbook writers for Publishing Research Quarterly and an entry on women textbook writers in The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995). "In keeping track of our collection, we noticed the large number of books published by Lindley Murray. This spurred my research, which culminated in the 1998 publication of The Murrays of Murray Hill, a study of the family and intellectual background of Lindley Murray. This book establishes that Lindley Murray was the largest-selling author in the world in the first four decades of the 19th century. "About 40 of our primers were microfilmed by Professor Richard Venezky, of the University of Delaware, as part of his microfilm collection of American primers. Our collection also became the basis for Writing the Past, edited by Jennifer Monaghan and Arlene Barry, and published in conjunction with a historical display of literacy textbooks at the 1999 meeting of the International Reading Association in San Diego. "We are donating our collection to the University of Kansas because of the presence there of an outstanding young scholar named Arlene Barry. We hope she will be able to make use of these textbooks as part of the reading education courses that she teaches."

return to content page

Kenneth Spencer Research Library • KU Libraries • University of Kansas • KSRL Exhibits