The Child’s Instructor, or Picture Alphabet.

Notes

A sharp copy of a Glasgow-printed child's alphabet chapbook, with woodcuts to illustrate each letter. Hugo calls them 'very pretty' and singles out the cut of the weathercock which illustrates the letter W as 'clearly by Thomas Bewick'; Roscoe and Brimmell call the weathercock 'the feeblest thing in the book' but aver 'some of the woodcuts are copied after [Bewick] or produced under his influence, and may have been done in his workshop'. Tattersfield gives it a main entry and cites Lumsden's complaints about the style of the cuts being too fine for his ability to print. This copy is in a variant binding, being stitched into wrappers with two larger woodcuts (depicting 'Darby and his wife Joan' to the front wrapper and 'The Cobler in his stall' to the rear), and the outer blank pages visible, while Tattersfield's description and other copies seen are in plain pink wrappers with the outer leaves used as pastedowns.