[Illustration:  A Wall-paper Book-Cover]

In Philadelphia, Benjamin and Jacob Johnson, and later Johnson and Warner, issued both tiny books two inches square, and somewhat larger volumes containing illustrations as well as text.  These firms used for binding gray and blue marbled paper, gold-powdered yellow cardboard, or salmon pink, blue, and olive-green papers, usually without ornamentation.  In eighteen hundred J. and J. Crukshank, of the same town, began to decorate with copper-plate cuts the outside of the white or blue paper covers of their imprints for children.  Other printers followed their example, especially after wood-engraving became more generally used.

In Wilmington, Delaware, John Adams printed and sold “The New History of Blue Beard” in both peacock-blue and olive-green paper covers; but Peter Brynberg, also of that town, was still in eighteen hundred and four using quaint wall-paper to dress his toy imprints.  Matthew Carey, the well-known printer of school-books for the children of Philadelphia, made a “Child’s Guide to Spelling and Reading” more acceptable by a charming cover of yellow and red striped paper dotted over with little black hearts suggestive of the old Primer rhyme for the letter B: 

   “My Book and Heart
    Shall never part.”

In New York the dealers in juvenile books seem either to have bound in calf such classics as “The Blossoms of Morality,” published by David Longworth at the Shakespeare Gallery in eighteen hundred and two, or in decorated but unattractive brown paper.  This was the cover almost invariably used for years by Samuel Wood, the founder of the present publishing-house of medical works.  He began in eighteen hundred and six to print the first of his many thousands of children’s religious, instructive, and nursery books.  As was the custom in order to insure a good sale, Wood first brought out a primer, “The Young Child’s A B C.”  He decorated its Quaker gray cover with a woodcut of a flock of birds, and its title-page with a picture, presumably by Alexander Anderson, of a girl holding up a dove in her left hand and holding down a lamb with her right.

In New England, Nathaniel Coverly of Salem sometimes used a watered pink paper to cover his sixteen page toy-books, and in Boston his son, as late as eighteen hundred and thirteen, still used pieces of large patterned wall-paper for six-penny books, such as “Tom Thumb,” “Old Mother Hubbard,” and “Cock Robin.”

The change in the appearance of most toy-books, however, was due largely to the increased use of illustrations.  The work of the famous English engraver, Thomas Bewick, had at last been successfully copied by a physician of New York, Dr. Alexander Anderson.