The hornbook, a form of ABC book, was common by Shakespeare's day. It consisted of a piece of parchment or paper pasted on a wooden board and protected by a leaf of horn. Hornbooks displayed letters of the alphabet, a and prayers for novice readers. Andrew Tuer described a typical hornbook with a line separating the lower case and capital letters from the syllabary. This syllabarium or syllabary, likely added to the hornbook in 1596, taught pronunciations of vowel and consonant combinations.