her it would not be advisable to publish in Kentucky,
or at least in Tennessee, a short note like this: 'The Public are
cautioned against buying "Webster's American Spelling-Book;" the
editions now in the market are pirated, badly printed, and incorrect.
The author expressly disclaims them.'"

The final success of the little book has been quite beyond definite
computation, but a few figures will show something of the course it has
run. In 1814, 1815, the sales averaged 286,000 copies a year; in 1828
the sales were estimated to be 350,000 copies. In 1847 the statement was
made that about twenty-four million copies of the book had been
published up to that time, and that the sale was then averaging a
million of copies a year. It was also then said, that during the twenty
years in which he was employed in compiling his "American Dictionary,"
the entire support of his family was derived from the profits of this
work, at a premium for copyright of five mills a copy. The sales for
eight years following the Civil War, namely, 1866-1873, aggregated
8,196,028; and the fact that the average yearly sale was scarcely
greater than in 1847 may be referred in part to the great enterprise in
the publication of school-books, which has marked the last twenty years,
by which his speller has been one only of a great many, in part, also,
to the impoverishment of the South where Webster's book had been more
generally accepted than at the North.

The great demand that there was for elementary school-books, the real
advance of Webster's over any then existing, the promptness with which
he met the first call, all these causes combined to give a great impetus
to the little book. At first sight there seems something amusing in the
importance which not only Webster but other men of the time attached to
the spelling-book. Timothy Pickering, in camp at Newburgh, waiting for
the final word of disbanding, sat up into the night to read it! "By the
eastern post yesterday," he writes to his wife, "I was lucky enough to
receive the new spelling-book [Webster's] I mentioned in my last, and
instead of sleeping (for I had a waking fit which prevented me), I read
it through last night, except that I only examined a part of the
different tables. I am much pleased with it. The author is ingenious,
and writes from his own experience as a school-master, as well as the
best authorities; and the time will come when no authority, as an
English grammarian, will be s