shank, of the same
town, began to decorate with copper-plate cuts the outside of the white
or blue paper covers of their imprints for children. Other printers
followed their example, especially after wood-engraving became more
generally used.

In Wilmington, Delaware, John Adams printed and sold "The New History of
Blue Beard" in both peacock-blue and olive-green paper covers; but Peter
Brynberg, also of that town, was still in eighteen hundred and four
using quaint wall-paper to dress his toy imprints. Matthew Carey, the
well-known printer of school-books for the children of Philadelphia,
made a "Child's Guide to Spelling and Reading" more acceptable by a
charming cover of yellow and red striped paper dotted over with little
black hearts suggestive of the old Primer rhyme for the letter B:

"My Book and Heart
Shall never part."

In New York the dealers in juvenile books seem either to have bound in
calf such classics as "The Blossoms of Morality," published by David
Longworth at the Shakespeare Gallery in eighteen hundred and two, or in
decorated but unattractive brown paper. This was the cover almost
invariably used for years by Samuel Wood, the founder of the present
publishing-house of medical works. He began in eighteen hundred and six
to print the first of his many thousands of children's religious,
instructive, and nursery books. As was the custom in order to insure a
good sale, Wood first brought out a primer, "The Young Child's A B C."
He decorated its Quaker gray cover with a woodcut of a flock of birds,
and its title-page with a picture, presumably by Alexander Anderson, of
a girl holding up a dove in her left hand and holding down a lamb with
her right.

In New England, Nathaniel Coverly of Salem sometimes used a watered pink
paper to cover his sixteen page toy-books, and in Boston his son, as
late as eighteen hundred and thirteen, still used pieces of large
patterned wall-paper for six-penny books, such as "Tom Thumb," "Old
Mother Hubbard," and "Cock Robin."

The change in the appearance of most toy-books, however, was due largely
to the increased use of illustrations. The work of the famous English
engraver, Thomas Bewick, had at last been successfully copied by a
physician of New York, Dr. Alexander Anderson.

Dr. Anderson was born in New York in seventeen hundred and seventy-five,
and by seventeen hundred and ninety-three was employed by printers and
publishers in New York, New Jersey, Phi