Hornbook

A hornbook (horn-book) is a single-sided alphabet tablet, which served from medieval times as a primer for study,[1] and sometimes included vowel combinations, numerals or short verse.

[4] The term (hornbook) has been applied to different study materials in different fields but owes its origin to children's education, represented by a sheet of vellum or paper displaying the alphabet, religious verse, etc., protected with a translucent covering of horn (or mica) and attached to a frame provided with a handle.

The lesson sheet, which was first of vellum and later of paper, were typically inscribed with a large cross,[n 3] followed by alphabet letters,[n 4] numbers and in later version, short verse.

Andrew Tuer described a typical hornbook with a line separating the lower case and capital letters from the syllabary.

Today, there are certainly many more "spurious" hornbooks in circulation than genuine but, in the absence of verified exemplars, skilled counterfeit can be hard to discount.

Miss Campion holding a hornbook, 1661. From Tuer 's History of the Horn-Book .
Leather hornbook in the Cary Graphic Arts Collection
A 19th-century replica of a Late Tudor oak Hornbook