Seminal work on domestic textbooks for elementary grades published

Ales Susha's "Belarusian ABC book", a major work on the national textbooks for primary grades, from antiquity to the present day, has been published. The researcher had worked on this book about books for five years. "Day and night, weekends and holidays, at home and on the road ... A long-suffering scientific study, conceived as a light work on the backdrop of the 400th anniversary of the first book called 'The Primer,'" he writes.

The monograph has as many as 336 pages of large format. It contains eight chapters, 125 paragraphs, 730 pictures and 1,025 references. Most of the monuments are unknown even to researchers, and illustrations from them are published for the first time. In order to collect information about Belarusian primers, Susha had to travel many countries, work in dozens of libraries, museums, archives, and search in private collections.

"Old (and relatively modern) Belarusian textbooks are extremely poorly preserved in Belarus itself (in fact, there are almost none)," comments the scientist. "Basically, I used illustrations from 78 state and private collections of Belarus, Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Slovenia, Sweden, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom".