In 1981, Stanford Libraries acquired over 10,000 books collected
over a forty-year period by Mary Schofield, who spent her career
as a librarian at Hoover Library. The collection consists of
illustrated children's tales, stories for young adults, and
works of reference relating to her collecting areas, with a
focus on works published since the late eighteenth century. The
Venezky Collection contains primers and readers published
between the end of the eighteenth century through the early
decades of the twentieth century. Many titles are present in
nearly every edition issued. In addition, there are early
pamphlets, chapbooks, primers, almanacs, dictionaries,
children's stories, plus works on penmanship, spelling, and
phonetics. "This digital collection consists of over 30 full-
text, digitized children's books. The books were selected using
the following criteria: publication date, rarity, uniqueness,
size, and location of publication. All of the items in the
digital collection were published before 1923, and