Chapter 5. Comenius in New York

Abstract

While the seventeenth-century humanist and educator John Amos Comenius (1592–1670) never travelled to New York, his 1658 Orbis Sensualium Pictus (Visible World in Pictures) did, as a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London import and as an 1810 New York imprint. Editions and expressively annotated individual copies of this image-rich, encyclopaedic, bilingual English-Latin book for children chart the social life of the Orbis Pictus in the United States. The first US facsimile (1887, Syracuse, New York) echoes the Orbis Sensualium Pictus’s diasporic roots, as a reader’s marks in the sole copy in the New York Public Library situate it amid the early twentieth century’s migrations of Eastern and Southern Europeans to New York.