First edition and extremely rare; this is the first work to demonstrate Louis Braille’s method of reading for the blind; it caused a revolution in the education of blind people. After several attempts to devise a successful system of type that could be read by the blind, it took a sixteen-year-old student at the Institut Royale des Jeunes Aveugles at Paris — Louis Braille (1809-52) — to simplify the earlier attempts and create a system which is now used throughout the world.

“When it was that Braille first started the complicated procedure of reducing the maximum of points to six is not known, but the principal of the Institute at the time, one Dr Pignier, recorded that the essentials of Braille’s scheme were laid before him in 1825, when the young man was hardly sixteen years old...

“The 32-page booklet — ‘Procedure for writing Words, Music and Plainsong by Means of Points’ — was printed in the Institute in raised characters, the text using the normal alphabet, which some pupils had painstakingly trained their fingers to decipher. Braille also invented the stylo and frame still used by the blind for writing...

“Thus Braille provided the blind with a complete alphabet, mathematical and musical notations, and a stenographic method of writing. Pignier, his first biographer, declared that his modification of the Barbier system was not merely an improvement, it was a 'new invention’...

“The Braille system was not given an immediate welcome; it was only in 1854 that it was officially accepted by the Institute itself. But at an international congress in Paris in 1878 it was adopted throughout Europe. It is now in use virtually throughout the literate world.”–Printing & the Mind of Man 292.

Fine copy in original state.

❧ En Français dans le Texte 242. Garrison-Morton 5851–(with wrong date).