Through a close reading of five nineteenth-century instructional books in the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books, this essay examines the relationship between new print technologies, memory, teaching, and learning. The article beings with a discussion of Comenius's seventeenth-century "Orbis Pictus," considered the first instructional picture book, in order to provide a brief overview of print technologies and their relationship to changing ideas about memory in teaching and learning. This is followed by analyses of two examples of hand-coloured books and three books illustrated by chromolithography, all from the Osborne Collection and published between 1857 and 1887. Reading the books alongside selected texts in educational psychology, the essay demonstrates the role that images could play in revising and transforming information imparted by books and teachers in order to provide opportunities for imaginative interpretation. This essay shows that pictures can indeed offer valuable evidence of historical pedagogical practices when pictures are used as "objects to think with".