Textbook Museum

Somber in his black coat and stovepipe hat, a tall young man slouched in the saddle one fall afternoon in 1826 while his horse ambled into the little village of Oxford, Ohio. Even as he rode he read, and his saddlebags bulged with volumes of Livy and Horace, Ovid and Xenophon. William Holmes McGuffey, newly appointed professor of ancient languages at Oxford's Miami University, was exactly the type of sobersided teacher the fledgling university wanted. Last week, in a high-ceilinged room of Miami University's Alumni Library, 300 members of the McGuffey Society came to dedicate a museum to the sober scholar (and to his disciple, Miami's late Dean Harvey C. Minnich), who was to become one of the best-known names in U.S. education: the author of McGuffey's famed Eclectic Readers.

In his textbooks, McGuffey presented an ambitious package: reading material for children of all ages, a fine anthology of old favorites, and a stern, explicit code of morals. Before they finally faded from U.S. schools in the early 1900s, the six Eclectic Readers and the Eclectic Spelling Book (edited by Brother Alexander McGuffey) sold some 130 million copies, probably had more influence on U.S. literary tastes and moral standards than any other book except the Bible.

Last week the members of the McGuffey Society inspected the fruits of nearly half a century's search for McGuffey memorabilia. They examined the octagonal revolving desk at which the Readers were written and the statue of the master himself, surrounded by children dressed in roundabouts and pantalets. The books in the collection, largely gathered by Dean Minnich, ran to nearly 400 editions, including one Japanese translation and some Southern reprints from Reconstruction days.

Loyal McGuffians wound up their celebration with an old-fashioned spelling bee and took part in a recitation contest. Later they discussed the possibilities of someday building an even finer museum. No one was quite sure how it could be done with the society's present dues of 10-c- a month.

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