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The Michael Zinman Collection of Printing for the Blind

2017; Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Volume: 141; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5215/pennmaghistbio.141.3.0361

2169-8546

Erika Piola,

Digital Accessibility for Disabilities

The Michael Zinman Collection of Printing for the Blind Erika Piola (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. The Gospel According to Saint Mark (Philadelphia, 1833), 2. Image courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia. The Library Company of Philadelphia has collected printing for the blind since at least 1838. That year, it acquired the first text printed in raised letters in the United States, the Gospel According to Saint Mark (1833) (fig. 1). It was printed by Jacob Snider Jr. for the Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind (PIIB), which Julius Friedlander (1803–39) established in [End Page 361] 1833. The text appeared in tactile rounded script, one of many reading systems developed in the nineteenth century to educate the visually impaired.1 In the following decades, more such publications entered the library’s holdings. In recent years, this growth took place through the generosity of Library Company trustee emeritus Michael Zinman. The Michael Zinman Collection of Printing for the Blind contains nearly one hundred of the few hundred titles of raised-print texts published in the country before 1890.2 PIIB used line-type texts in its curriculum during most of the nineteenth century.3 Line types (i.e., alphabetical systems) mimicked the Roman alphabet. Developed in Paris in 1784, they were the first successfully printed raised type.4 Developers assumed they would be taught by sighted teachers, ensuring the education of the visually impaired conformed to the “manners of the seeing.”5 Although texts were initially printed at PIIB and its peer institutions, production and distribution proved cost prohibitive. Books printed for the blind lacked a universally accepted reading system or a central publishing house. By mid-century, these texts became educational commodities.6 Nineteenth-century books printed for the blind typically exhorted piety in overcoming adversity, with Biblical and popular moral works, such as The Dairyman’s Daughter (1883), predominating. Primers, geography and music lesson books, and history, science, and literary volumes also feature in the dozens of tactile works in the library’s holdings. Many are reprints of popular, ink-printed [End Page 362] texts. A number of the volumes, like Denison Olmsted’s Rudiments of Natural Philosophy (1845), contain embossed illustrations, maps, or diagrams (fig. 2). The Zinman Collection serves as a compelling resource to examine the Victorian pictorial turn. In this era, society privileged sight in the attainment of knowledge. In the nineteenth century, the blind learned to read immersed in this visually literate culture. The works in the Zinman Collection document both the history of the sociopolitically charged education students received and the popular and visual culture of the visually impaired. The collection also includes a number of genre firsts, printed in association with PIIB, that provide an alternate perspective on nineteenth-century pedagogical priorities. The school issued the first ever raised-print periodical, The Students’ Magazine (1838–45), which contained “original compositions by the pupils . . . illustrative of their . . . thinking.” PIIB also published the first tactile Dictionary of the English Language (1860), trumpeted as “an invaluable aid in teaching . . . the true meaning of words in daily use.”7 A decade later, the combined-letter version of The Merchant of Venice (1870) entered the school’s library. Printed by the type’s designer, Napoleon B. Kneass (1844–98), an instructor and former pupil at the school, the literary classic was touted as the first Shakespeare play published in its entirety in raised print.8 By the turn of the twentieth century, alphabetical systems began to fade from the education of the blind, both in Pennsylvania and nationally. The American Printing House for the Blind, in Louisville, Kentucky, became the official, federally funded source of education texts for the visually impaired in 1879. This principal publishing house facilitated the pervasiveness of dot systems by spearheading technological advances in raised printing. Braille and New York Point, most easily read by the fingertip, prevailed. The Zinman Collection contains a number of specimen sheets, some compiled as scrapbooks, demonstrating these codes. The works document the protracted evolution in reading systems for the blind, which for many decades privileged sight over touch. These raised texts provide an unrealized site for exploring a kinesthetic...