In 1875, Farny began supplying images for the McGuffey’s readers. The McGuffey readers were well known by then, having been teaching kids to read since the 1830s. The McGuffey Eclectic Reader. series is sub brand that is part of a larger umbrella of Eclectic Readers. Here is a partial list as of 1880.
As well as the McGuffey Eclectic readers, Farny illustrated Eclectic’s Venable’s U.S. History and one of the Thalheimer’s Historical Series, The History of England. In 1881 Farny would illustrate an Eclectic Geography and in 1886 Farny would illustrate Eclectic’s Language Lessons textbook.
BACKGROUND: In the early 1830s, Cincinnatian Winthrop Smith began looking for a text book for kids to publish, as his firm, Truman and Smith, was struggling and he believed there was a future in textbooks. He initially approached Catherine Beecher, brother of yet-to-be-famous pastor Henry Ward Beecher and sister to future author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” Harriet Beecher (later Harriet Beecher Stowe). At the time, the Beechers were living in Cincinnati (later they moved to Brooklyn, New York).
Catherine Beecher was already an accomplished writer of arithmetic textbooks for women when Winthrop Smith approached her about writing books for an “Eclectic Series”. Catherine declined the offer, as she did not want to “discontinue her work” to write text books for Truman and Smith. Instead, she recommended Smith approach Professor William Holmes McGuffey, who also lived in the Cincinnati area.
Coincidently, McGuffey has already planned a series of readers for what we now know as public schools, but were labeled “common schools” at that point. McGuffey knew that if Ohio’s free education system for all kids was to be successful, good, affordable textbooks would be necessary.
The McGuffey readers proved successful, despite competition, over the succeeding decades.
In the early 1870s, faced with pressure from other reader series, McGuffey’s readers needed to be modernized with a different layout and more illustrations. Accounts suggest that Henry Farny played some role in carrying out the redesign of the McGuffey readers for 1879; and, Farny has said he is proud of the work he did on the readers, but it’s not clear if he is referring to the redesign or the images he supplied the McGuffey series. It is interesting to note the design of the text on the cover the 1879 books; the angular san serif design is similar to other covers Farny has done, such as here and here.
Farny contributed illustrations to six different books in the McGuffey Eclectic Readers series for 1879:
- McGuffey’s First Eclectic Reader (below)
- McGuffey’s Second Eclectic Reader
- McGuffey’s Third Eclectic Reader
- McGuffey’s Fourth Eclectic Reader
- McGuffey’s Fifth Eclectic Reader
- McGuffey’s Sixth Eclectic Reader
Here are the images from the 1879 edition of McGuffey’s First Eclectic Reader (full reader on Archive.org). No captions were provided for these images in the book, so I only provide page numbers below:
