“This is an important and fascinating work… Jill Shefrin already has a reputation for original research and meticulous scholarship. In this marvelous volume she has given us more, providing evidence for a previously unrecorded market in nineteenth-century teaching aids for both home education and schools. She has brought together over 2,200 teaching aids produced by the two Darton firms of booksellers between 1787 and 1876. Her detailed checklist includes table games, dissected puzzles, alphabet pastimes, writing sheets, and, especially, prints and maps for the infant school market. I myself had no idea that such a variety of teaching aids was available, and this book has made me aware of what fun it must have been to be taught the rudiments of education in the past.”
—Iona Opie—

Focusing on the output of a single publishing family, this lavishly illustrated volume brings together for the first time the rich diversity of teaching pastimes and ephemera issued by the print trades in this period. It offers a picture of a little explored chapter in the history of publishing for children in England through a comprehensive bibliographic record of the material culture of education as issued by one family of booksellers. William Darton and his son (also William) were among the busiest and most prolific publishers of children’s books in the early nineteenth century. Their books were the subject of a massive bibliography by their descendant Lawrence Darton, published in 2004. But that work excluded the Dartons’ educational games, toys and teaching aids. In this successor volume Jill Shefrin has documented the family’s massive involvement in another juvenile market.
Finding the ephemeral objects issued by the Dartons and describing them in such meticulous detail has been the work of some seven years delving among private and public collections on two continents and, as Iona Opie says, Jill Shefrin’s marvelous volume is not only important for its new insights but fascinating as well. It will be a valuable tool both for historians of children’s books, and for scholars of education and culture.

Winner of the Justin G. Schiller Prize (Bibliographical Society of America). Nominated for the F.J. Harvey Darton Award (Children’s Books History Society), and the International Bibliographical Prize (International League of Antiquarian Booksellers).

Jill Shefrin is a consultant and scholar in the field of historical children’s books and education. An independent historian and bibliographer, she was a librarian with the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books (1980-1996) and a Research Associate in Arts at Trinity College, University of Toronto (2000-2008). Her research focuses on the use of ephemera and pastimes in education, particularly for girls, and she has published and lectured extensively on the subject. She has authored several exhibition catalogues, numerous articles, and two other Cotsen Occasional Press publications, and co-edited Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain (Ashgate, 2009). She teaches the Children’s Books course at the University of London Rare Books Summer School.

HES & DE GRAAF Publishers is the worldwide distributor for this and other publications of the Cotsen Children´s Library / Cotsen Occasional Press.