Alguses on ABD - Tartu Ülikooli raamatukogu kalender 2025

The calendar was compiled and translated by Marika Liivamägi and designed by Maarja Roosi

IT STARTS WITH ABD
In 2025, we celebrate the 500th anniversary of the first printed book in the Estonian language.
The existence of books presupposes the existence of readers, and reading literacy begins with the primer or ABD-book. For a long time, the ABD-book was a child’s first book, no matter whether they studied at home or attended school.
The University of Tartu Library calendar for 2025, the Year of Estonian Book, offers a brief cross-section of Estonian-language primers printed in about 230 years, and used by many generations. The first small-format ABD-books of the late 18th and early 19th century contained only letters, syllables and very short stories essential for learning, but starting from the mid-19th century, illustrations also found their way into the primers. Different editions of these primers were reprinted often, but they were heavily used and fell apart and only few of them have been preserved until now.
The author of the oldest Estonian-language ABD-book held in the UT Library collections is Otto Wilhelm Masing (1763-1832). His ABD or Luggemise-Ramat Lastele, kes tahawad luggema öppida (ABD or a Reading-Book for Children who Want to Learn to Read) was first published in Tartu in 1795. The earlier 18th-century primers contained only religious texts. This new book included also short secular stories and guidelines for parents about teaching children at home; it showed the handwritten alphabet and explained punctuation marks and the multiplication table. The woodcut image on the book’s title page is the first picture depicting peasants’ life in an Estonian-language book.
The South Estonian-language primer Luggemisse Ramat laste kolitamisse tarwis. Eddimänne jaggo (Reading-Book for Teaching Children. The First Part) was authored by Carl Heinrich Gehewe (1796-1856) and printed in Tartu in 1841. This is the first illustrated Estonian-language primer, which offered its readers many secular instructive sayings, stories and poems and introduced different printed and written alphabets.
Both of these primers are included in the Red Book of Estonian publications from 1535-1850, only very few known copies of them have been preserved. Digitised full texts of these books can be found in the digital archive DIGAR.
The primers published in the first half of the 20th century grew more and more child-friendly as they became richly illustrated, their stories and poems attracted children’s interest and encouraged them to learn. The primers published towards the end of the 20th century remind many of us of our childhood and school years. We are glad to see that nowadays many authors and artists have successfully teamed up to create and publish attractive artistic primers in a wide range of subjects. The recent decades have also seen the emergence of primers in many different Estonian dialects, encouraging children to learn their own heritage languages.
Why is the primer called an ABD-Book? The original Estonian alphabet does not include the borrowed letters C, F, Q, W, X, Y and Z. Therefore, the titles of older primers reflect the Estonian alphabet of their time.
On the covers of both the older and contemporary primers, we can often find an image of a rooster. In Estonia, as well as in many other countries, the rooster is the symbol of the primer, inspiring and encouraging children to learn diligently. There is a well-known special word in Estonian, “kukeaabits” (“rooster primer”), to mark a primer with a rooster on its cover.  
All primers shown in this calendar are held in the UT Library collections.