Touch & Talk
This event, co-organized with Tanis Woodland, is for people with visual disabilities. Join Vanessa Warne for a Touch Tour of the Books Without Ink exhibit. All artifacts featured in the exhibit will be available for examination by touch; our conversation will explore connections between present-day barriers to access, including barriers in archives and museums, and the first century of blind people’s activism to secure access to text and to writing tools.
Guest Lecture by Dr. Hannah Thompson
Dr. Hannah Thompson (University of London, Royal Holloway) visited Books Without Ink in October 2015 as a featured guest speaker. She presented on both her research and her work as the author of the blog Blind Spot (http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/). Her talk was attended by members of Manitoba’s Disability Studies Network.
Artist Talk by Teresa Jaynes
Teresa Jaynes creates installations and artist books based on her research in libraries and special collections. She has exhibited her work widely in the US and is a recipient of a Pew Artist Fellowship from the Pew Charitable Trust. She is the creator of the interactive and accessible art installation The Moon Reader, an exploration of a raised-letter writing system invented by William Moon.
Outreach Event at Victorian Body Conference
The organizers of the Victorian Body Conference are pleased to announce Vanessa Warne (University of Manitoba) will be presenting a hands-on workshop on “Raised-Print and the Reading Body” on Friday April 10 at 4:30. The workshop will feature a collection of rare and fragile raised-print books produced in the nineteenth century. These books were made for and by readers who relied on touch instead of sight for their access to print. Please join Vanessa to examine these books and to discuss how they alter our understanding of the relationship between the body and the book in the Victorian period.
Books Without Ink Visits UBC Okanagan
This event welcomes members of the public and members of the University of British Columbia, Okanagan community, as well as the former and past presidents of the Canadian Federation of the Blind, to explore raised-print books and other artifacts of the history of blind people’s education and activism. This temporary display is hosted by the staff of UBC Okanagan's Rare Book room.
Image Descriptions: Unlike other images on this site, the five images on the Events page are not captioned for screen reading software. The first image, illustrating the Touch & Talk event, is a photograph of a page of opened tactile magazine from the early twentieth century that is embossed in William Moon’s script. The second image, illustrating the Guest Lecture by Dr. Hannah Thompson, is a photograph of ten women who are smiling; they are gathered together and face the photographer. Some are standing; one person uses a wheelchair and one person uses crutches; an exhibit poster is held by a woman in the middle of the image. The third image, paired with the event Artist Talk by Teresa Jaynes, shows a group of approximately forty people who are seated in the University of Manitoba’s Archives and who face toward a lectern. The fourth image, illustrating the Outreach Event at Victorian Body Conference, is a photograph of a man and two women. All three wear name tags and either point toward or touch the open surface of a large raised-print book from the early nineteenth century that is printed in Howe type and whose covers rest on fabric supports so that the book does not lay flat on the table. In the background, another group examine a different artifact. The fifth and final image is a photograph of William Moon’s script for blind readers, raised-print letters from his alphabet presented alongside ink-print versions of conventional lettering. Some letters resemble their equivalent in the other script; other pairings are very different. The letters C and V are the same shape in both scripts whereas the letter X is adapted to a V-shape with the opening of the V facing left rather than upward. The ink-print W is modified by Moon to an upside down U shape; the ink-print D is a C shape whose opening faces left instead of right.