Cover not available
Part of
Transnational Books for Children 1750-1900: Producers, consumers, encounters
Edited by Charlotte Appel, Nina Christensen and M.O. Grenby
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 15] 2023
► pp. 110–134

Chapter 5
Comenius in New York

While the seventeenth-century humanist and educator John Amos Comenius (1592–1670) never travelled to New York, his 1658 Orbis Sensualium Pictus (Visible World in Pictures) did, as a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London import and as an 1810 New York imprint. Editions and expressively annotated individual copies of this image-rich, encyclopaedic, bilingual English-Latin book for children chart the social life of the Orbis Pictus in the United States. The first US facsimile (1887, Syracuse, New York) echoes the Orbis Sensualium Pictus’s diasporic roots, as a reader’s marks in the sole copy in the New York Public Library situate it amid the early twentieth century’s migrations of Eastern and Southern Europeans to New York.
Article outline
  • The world in pictures
  • The Orbis Pictus in the United States
  • Traces of US child readers
  • The Orbis Pictus in the New York Public Library
  • Transnational readers
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 August 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.15.05cra
References (48)
References
Primary sources
Barber, J. Warner & Barber, E. G. [1850]. Historical, Poetical and Pictorial American Scenes: principally moral and religious; being a selection of interesting incidents in American history: to which is added a historical sketch, of each of the United States. New Haven, CT: For J. H. Bradley.Google Scholar
Bardeen, C. W. 1887. Editor’s Preface and Comments upon the Orbis Pictus. In The Orbis Pictus of John Amos Comenius, iii–x. Syracuse, NY: C. W. Bardeen.Google Scholar
1908. Catalogue of the School Bulletin Publications. Syracuse, NY: C. W. Bardeen.Google Scholar
Comenius, John Amos. 1659. Orbis Sensualium Pictus. In Sadler, John. 1968. John Amos Comenius, Orbis Pictus. A Facsimile of the First English edition of 1659. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
. 1777. Orbis Sensualium Pictus. London: S. Leacroft.Google Scholar
. 1810. Orbis Sensualium Pictus. New York: T. & J. Swords.Google Scholar
. 1887. The Orbis Pictus of John Amos Comenius. Syracuse, NY: C. W. BardeenGoogle Scholar
Greenwood, James. 1713. The London Vocabulary, English and Latin. London: A. Bettesworth. Eighteenth Century Collections Online, <[URL]>
. 1806. The Philadelphia Vocabulary, English and Latin. Philadelphia: Mathew Carey.Google Scholar
Secondary sources
Appadurai, Arjun. 2006. The thing itself. Public Culture 18 (1): 15–21. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bagley, Ayers. An Invitation to Wisdom and Schooling. Educational Iconics, College of Education and Human Development, University of Minnesota. <[URL]>
Black New Yorkers. Migrations and New Neighborhoods, 1865–1916. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. <[URL]>
Bostwick, Arthur Elmore. 1910. The American Public Library. New York & London: Appleton.Google Scholar
Brückner, Martin. 2006. The Geographic Revolution in Early America. Maps, Literacy, and National Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
. 2017. The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750–1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Čapková, Dagmar. 1970. J. A. Comenius’s “Orbis Pictus” in its conception as a textbook for the universal education of children. Paedagogica Historica 10.1: 5–27. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Corbett, Edward P. J. 1969. The Rhetoric of the open hand and the rhetoric of the closed fist. College Composition and Communication 20.5: 288–296. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cremin, Lawrence A. 1961. The Transformation of the School. Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957. 1st ed. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Dain, Phyllis. 1972. The New York Public Library. A History of its Founding and Early Years. New York: New York Public Library.Google Scholar
Donnell Library. <[URL]>
Eastman, Carolyn. 2009. A Nation of Speechifiers. Making an American Public after the Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ellis Island. National Parks Service. U.S. Immigration Statistics: Immigration Station at Ellis Island, NY. Annual Reports of the Commissioner General of Immigration, 1892–1924. Washington, D.C. <[URL]>
Fowle, William Bentley. Historical background and summary. William Bentley Fowle Abridgement of Dibdin’s Classics, c. 1813, Mss octavo volumes F, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester MA. <[URL]>Google Scholar
Galey, Alan, et al. 2012. Imagining the Architectures of the Book. Textual Cultures. Text, Contexts, Interpretation. 7.2: 20–42. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. <[URL]>
Glynn, Tom. 2015. Reading Publics. New York City’s Public Libraries, 1754–1911. New York: Fordham University Press.Google Scholar
Green, James N. 1985. Mathew Carey, Publisher and Patriot. Philadelphia: Library Company of Philadelphia.Google Scholar
Harvard Art Museums. Gallery Text. John Singleton Copley. Portrait of Nicolas Boylston. <[URL]>
Hill, Alan G. 1975. Wordsworth, Comenius, and the Meaning of Education. The Review of English Studies 26,103: 301–312. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jefferson, Thomas and Looney, J. Jefferson. 2017. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Retirement Series, Volume 14: 1 February to 31 August 1819. Princeton: Princeton University Press. < [URL]> DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kelley, Mary. 2012. Learning to Stand and Speak. Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina PressGoogle Scholar
Knubel, Helen. 1940. Alexander Anderson and early American book illustration. The Princeton University Library Chronicle 1.3: 8–18. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McGill, Meredith. 2003. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Morison, Samuel Eliot. 2013 [1936]. Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century. Vol. I. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Monaghan, Charles and E. Jennifer Monaghan. 2015. Schoolbooks. In A History of the Book in America. Volume 2: An Extensive Republic. Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840, Robert A. Gross & Mary Kelley (eds), 304–318. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Monticello. Thomas Jefferson’s Family. <[URL]>
Moroney, Siobhan. 2001. Latin, Greek and the American schoolboy: ancient languages and class determinism in the Early Republic. The Classical Journal 96.3: 295–307.Google Scholar
NYPL [New York Public Library]. Riverside. <[URL]>
Pomeroy, Jane R. 2005. Alexander Anderson, 1775–1870, Wood Engraver and Illustrator, An Annotated Bibliography. New Castle, DE & Worcester, MA: Oak Knoll Press and American Antiquarian Society.Google Scholar
Report of the Director for the Year Ending December 31, 1908. New York Public Library.
Sadler, John E. 1968. Introduction. John Amos Comenius, Orbis Pictus. A Facsimile of the First English Edition of 1659, 1–84. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Scott, Susan Holloway. Gentlemen at Leisure: Banyans. Two Nerdy History Girls. June 27, 2010. <[URL]>
Smith, Steven Carl. 2017. An Empire of Print. The New York Publishing Trade in the Early American Republic. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Spinka, M. 1943. John Amos Comenius. That Incomparable Moravian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Trinity Church, N.Y. 1788–1839. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. (1839–1899). <[URL]>
Turner, James. 1972. The visual realism of Comenius. History of Education 1.2: 113–138. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
White, Shane. 1991. Somewhat More Independent. The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810. Athens: University of Georgia Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar