The Complete Child's Cabinet Library: Fifty Volumes of Moral and Religious Instruction

Child’s Cabinet Library.
[Philadelphia: American Sunday-School Union, ca. 1860]. (BRB0260)

This extremely rare, complete set of fifty volumes was published by the American Sunday-School Union in the mid-nineteenth century. The first twenty-five volumes each include two texts, with a separate title page and pagination for each work; the final twenty-five volumes contain a single text. All of the titles include wood-engraved illustrations and are uniformly bound in marbled boards with dyed-black sheep spines stamped and numbered in gold.

The Child’s Cabinet Library includes numerous moral stories as well as other works devoted to religious instruction, including catechisms and prayers. The texts are primarily in prose, but some titles are in verse and a few in dialogue form. Periodically, additional prayers, hymns, or devotional poems were also inserted at the end of a text. This complete set is one of two known to exist.