Books Without Ink

An engraving from an illustrated nineteenth-century magazine. It depicts three people: a woman who wears glasses and a dark puffed sleeve dress and two children, one on either side of her. The three sit at a table. One child reads a book by touch in…

Books Without Ink: Reading, Writing, and Blindness (1830-1930)

Raised-print books, designed by and for blind people, have a rich history. The University of Manitoba’s Archives & Special Collections is home to a small but important collection of rare and fragile raised-print books. Embossed in now obsolete rivals to braille, these books can teach us about innovation and accommodation, about the history of reading, and about the rights of people with visual disabilities, including the right to read.

Books Without Ink was curated by Dr. Vanessa Warne and Sabrina Mark and was hosted by the University of Manitoba's Archives & Special Collections. It paired the Archives' collection of raised-print books with artifacts from important repositories of blind people's history, including the Perkins School for the Blind. Explore this site to learn more about the exhibit, which ran from September 2015 until April 2016.

Exhibit

Accessibility

A photograph of a woman who leans over a desk; she holds a braille alphabet guide and the leash of a guide dog with one hand; with the other hand she examines reproductions of now obsolete alphabets created for and by blind readers.

Art

A photograph of textured and inkless pages from an artist’s book by Teresa Jaynes. One page has the raised impression of a thin crescent moon; the other page shows text printed in William Moon’s adapted script for blind readers.

Audio Archive

A photograph of a man wearing dark glasses sitting at a desk and touching the open pages of a tactile book. A woman stands beside the desk, touching the same book. Between them a standing man wears a recording device and holds a microphone to captur…