The pictorial primer

A pictorial primer is a message that carries its own instructions for being read. Ordinary writing assumes a reader who already knows the language: the marks stand for sounds, and the sounds stand for words, and if you have lost the sounds — because you speak another tongue, or because four thousand years have passed — the marks go silent. A primer removes that assumption. It starts from the one thing two strangers can still share: a picture and the thing it shows. Put the two side by side, enough times, in the same way, and the reader works out the rule for themselves — *the mark beside the picture is its name* — and can then read a name you never spoke aloud. From that first rung you can climb: to counting, by repeated marks; to actions, by before-and-after; to ideas, by combining pictures you have already taught. The primer is the ladder, and it must carry every rung, because there is no teacher waiting at the top.

Comenius published the *Orbis Sensualium Pictus* — "the visible world in pictures" — in 1658, and it is usually called the first illustrated textbook for children. Its trick was simple and new: 150 numbered woodcuts, each thing in the picture numbered, each number keyed to the word, so the eye taught the word instead of the ear. A child who had never read could bootstrap into Latin, or German, or after Charles Hoole's 1659 translation, English, from the pictures alone. That solved a near problem — teaching a beginner who shares your world but not yet your letters. The same machine solves a far harder one: teaching a reader who shares neither your letters nor your world. Every attempt since to send a message across an unbridgeable gap has been, underneath, a pictorial primer.

The primer became civilization's method for talking to strangers in space and in time. In 1972 NASA bolted a gold-anodized aluminium plaque to Pioneer 10, designed by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake with art by Linda Salzman Sagan: a man with his hand raised in greeting, and a map of fourteen pulsars whose slowing pulse-rates fix not only where the craft came from but *when* it left — a clock built from spinning stars, legible to anyone who has studied the sky. The Long Now Foundation's Rosetta Disk packs 1,500 languages onto three inches of nickel and teaches, on its own face, that you must magnify it to read it. And when Sandia National Laboratories was asked in 1993 how to warn people 10,000 years hence away from buried nuclear waste, its experts drafted a message meant to survive the death of every present language: *"This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us."* Each is the *Orbis Pictus* grown up — a document that assumes no shared tongue and teaches its own reading, so that a vault sealed today can still be opened, and understood, by someone who shares nothing with us but eyes and the habit of looking. (See recipe.)