Web page By means of a Nineteenth-Century Embossed U.S. Atlas Designed with Touchable Cartography for Blind College students — Colossal



Design
Historical past
Illustration

#blindness
#books
#incapacity
#geography
#maps
#United States

Maine, Atlas of the US, Printed for the Use of the Blind (1837). All photographs through David Rumsey Map Associates

A few decade after French educator Louis Braille invented the eponymous system for blind and sight-impaired readers, the New England Establishment for Training of the Blind launched its personal embossed designs permitting these with low or no imaginative and prescient entry to necessary info. Beneath the management of Samuel Gridley Howe, the varsity, which is now the Perkins College for the Blind, acquired a printing press in 1835 and started to create quite a lot of studying supplies with raised writing for its college students. A type of books was an atlas of the US, which held touchable cartography inside its pages.

Paired with descriptions written in commonplace Latin script—this proved rather more tough to learn than braille and by no means gained the recognition of its counterpart—the maps include typical info like longitude and latitude, together with the world’s inhabitants, local weather, and commerce. Stable traces denote rivers, a singular raised shoreline buttressed by parallel traces represents oceans, and clustered triangles are mountains. Printed in 1837 in an version of fifty, this model of the atlas comprises simply 24 states. Solely 4 copies are recognized to stay.

Flip via digital scans of the ebook at David Rumsey Map Associates. (through Kottke)

New Hampshire

Rhode Island

Ohio

Illinois

Pennsylvania

New Jersey

#blindness
#books
#incapacity
#geography
#maps
#United States

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