Orbis Sensualium Pictus, hoc est omnium fundamentalium in Mundo rerum et in vita actionum pictura et nomenclatura ; Prima in Dania editio, quae multis in melius et ulilius mutatis, post Latinam, Teutonicam, Gallicam, Italicam et Polonicam Linguan idiomate Danico aucta est in usum Scholarum (etc.)

With “Orbis sensualium pictus” (The Visible World in Pictures, first edition 1658), the theologian and pedagogue Johann Amos Comenius from Moravia not only created the first children's picture book but perhaps even the first European school textbook altogether, a teaching medium with text and images. Amongst his trailblazing ideas were his proposal to set up general compulsory schooling for boys and girls, the use of the mother tongue as the basis for teaching, close links between action, image and word in the learning process, the arrangement of the teaching material according to the principles of learnability and the division of pupils into learning groups and the gradation of the school and the curriculum.
The Latin motto on the title page of his “Orbis pictus”, “Omnia sponte fluant, absit violentia rebus” (“Everything flows from its own propulsion, force is alien to things”), shows Comenius’ attitude. He saw educating young people to wisdom as the saving path on which mankind could find a way out of its corrupting errors and return to the order of the world as God had laid down.