Indianapolis: Bolton & Livingston, Printers, 1836.
Price: $2,500.00
Softcover. First edition. Octavo. 16pp. Removed from a bound volume. Faint stamp of a philosophical society, horizontal fold (possibly as mailed), else very good. Eulogy of Parke, important Indiana politician and soldier. On the final leaf the book is inscribed to Joseph Ray by Daniel Drake: "J.B. Ray. Doct. Danl. Drake, City of Cincinnati, Ohio."
Drake was an important American physician and social reformer, in 1819 he helped organize the Medical College of Ohio in Cincinnati.
Ray was a professor of mathematics and wrote several books on the subject, beginning in 1834 with *An Introduction to Ray's Eclectic Arithmetic,* the first of a series of six textbooks which became the most popular and widely used American mathematics textbooks of the 19th Century. They also formed the basis for *Ray's Mathematical Series* of textbooks. As late as 1913, annual sales exceeded a quarter of a million copies a year, and total sales of the arithmetic books alone are estimated at 120 million copies. The success of Ray's *Arithmetic* series prompted his publisher to seek an author for a set of readers. They chose William Holmes McGuffey, who joined Ray on the faculty of Woodward College in Cincinnati, where he wrote the *McGuffey Readers* which surpassed even Ray's *Arithmetic* to become the most popular textbook ever written. *OCLC* locates seven copies of this pamphlet over two records.
Item #415575
