Finalist for the 2025 SHARP Book History Book Prize

Winner of the 2025 Justin G. Schiller Prize for Bibliographical Work on Children’s Books from The Bibliographical Society of America

By the close of the eighteenth century, learning to read and write became closely associated with learning about the material world, and a vast array of games and books from the era taught children how to comprehend the physical world of “things.” Examining a diverse archive of popular science books, primers, grammars, toys, manufacturing books, automata, and literature from Maria Edgeworth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Anna Letitia Barbauld, The Education of Things attests that material culture has long been central to children’s literature.

Elizabeth Massa Hoiem argues that the combination of reading and writing with manual tinkering and scientific observation promoted in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain produced new forms of “mechanical literacy,” competencies that were essential in an industrial era. As work was repositioned as play, wealthy children were encouraged to do tasks in the classroom that poor children performed for wages, while working-class children honed skills that would be crucial to their social advancement as adults.

Nursery rhymes have been told to children for centuries. Many people think that they are just meant to make children smile. However, preschool children's awareness of rhyme and alliteration has an important influence on their success in learning to read and to spell. In Rhyme and Reason in Reading and Spelling, the authors explore this causal hypothesis using a new research design of combining longitudinal methods with intervention, and they provide strong evidence to show that there is a positive relationship between recognizing similar sounds, as found in nursery rhymes, and learning to read and to spell. The authors also investigate the relationship of this skill to children's learning difficulties. This is the first volume in the International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities Monograph series.