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Cover of William Holmes McGuffey's First Eclectic Reader , 1836.
Credit: Walter Havighurst Special Collections, Miami University Libraries, Oxford, Ohio
This 1836 cover introduced the McGuffey Eclectic Reader to school families across America. Combining civic and spiritual themes with a bare bones approach to the fundamentals of learning, the Eclectic Reader for a while was thought to be second in popularity only to the Bible.