An attempt to make an historical picture of American education, probably the original venture in this line, has resulted in the formation by the College Library of a collection of American textbooks and primers of the last 200 years which now numbers more than 20,000 volumes, the largest collection of textbooks for educational research in the world. Most of these volumes which are arranged chronologically to show the development of these instruments of school and college education, are in the Widener Building, but the more recent publications are kept in Larence Hall.

In 1924 the Library was on the point of disposing a large number of old texts and primers which were making classification difficult. The officials conceived the idea of making a collection of these schoolbooks, a project which received the full support of the School of Education. Funds were appropriated by H. W. Holmes '03, dean of the School of Education, and a full staff was put in charge of it. With these new books were bought, prominent among them a set of Soviet Russian primers arranged to show the contrast between the most radical methods of today and those applied by the "New England Primer.