An extraordinary survival. First published in 1678, this edition of Bunyan’s classic work was printed specifically for those without sight. Set in Boston Line Type, it precedes the first book printed in Braille by a year. An immensely satisfying copy, even the label on the spine is in raised type.
While the first book using embossed letters was printed by Valentin Haüy (1745-1822) in 1786 - Essai sur l’education des Aveugles - it was largely considered unsuccessful. Others, such as James Gall (1808-1895), became interested in educating the blind around 1826. He is largely credited with reviving the interest in printing for the blind. In 1827, he published A First Book for Teaching the Art of Reading to the Blind which was the first dedicated work for a blind audience in English.
Samuel Gridley Howe (1801-1876) was the next important figure in this field. Educated at Brown before studying medicine at Harvard in 1821, Howe fought in the Greek War of Independence and returned to Boston in 1831. An old friend from Brown, John Dix Fisher, offered him the directorship of New England Institution for the Education of the Blind, which was then so nascent it had neither students nor a building. Nonetheless, Howe accepted. He recruited two teachers from Europe - Emile Trencheri from Paris and John Pringle from Edinburgh - and operated initially from his father’s home. With the additional aid of his two sisters, Sophia and Abigail, they set about educating six students. In 1839, the school moved into larger premises in South Boston and took on a new name, Perkins Institute for the Blind.
“Armed with equal education ideals, he believed that the blind should no longer be doomed to inequality, to becoming only ‘mere objects of pity.’ During his first years as director, he visited seventeen states, establishing schools in Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. He also developed an embossed-letter system for the blind to read, first known as Howe Type, and later as Boston Line Type. It was used at Perkins until Braille came into common usage at the turn of the century” (ANB).
In his account of the 1851 Great Exhibition, John Tallis, describes the formulation of Boston Line Type: “[Howe] adopted the common Roman letter of the lower-case. His first aim was to compress the letter into a comparatively compact and cheap form. This he accomplished by cutting off all the flourishes and points about the letters, and reducing them to a minimum size and elevation which could be distinguished by the generality of the blind. He so managed the letters that they occupied but little more than one space and a half instead of three. A few of the circular letters were modified into angular shapes, yet preserving the original forms sufficiently to be easily read by all … It was immediately adopted and subsequently became extensively and almost exclusively used by the seven principal public institutions throughout the country. It is now the only system taught or tolerated in the United States and deserves only to be better known in Great Britain and elsewhere to be appreciated.” The ownership inscription on this copy - Daniel Lister in Berkeley Square - is evidence of the adoption of Howe’s type across the Atlantic.
Reading was critical to the education of the blind and “Howe was as concerned with communicating what and how sighted students learned as he was with adapting pedagogical material to the specific needs of blind and low-vision students … Howe wanted his students to have the books that would allow them to learn independently without the help of a sighted person. As Howe imagined it, blind individuals, who previously had often been uneducated and isolated, would be able to leave Perkins and enter into society as self-reliant citizens” (Weiner, 136).
One of his great claims to fame was his role in the education of Laura Bridgman (1829-1889) who entered the Howe’s school in 1837 at the age of eight. She became the first deaf-blind American child to receive an education. Within two years, she was able to write her name legibly, she started maths lessons in 1840 and remained at the school until 1850. To maintain the institution’s solvency, “Howe solicited support and donations for the rapidly growing institution by inviting visitors, staging public demonstrations, and writing public accounts of the school’s activities. But even before Bridgman arrived in 1837, Howe was attracting interest for his efforts in printing for the blind … and printed the first complete New Testament as well as Milton, Bunyan, and some Shakespeare” (ibid, 137). With only four books to choose from, Bridgman would certainly have read this edition of Bunyan.
In New England in 1836, The Pilgrim’s Progress would’ve been a natural choice for someone such as Howe. “One of the most popular books ever printed, The Pilgrim’s Progress was composed by Bunyan partly as a distraction from ‘worser thoughts’, partly to allegorize his religious experience as a guide for others … Bunyan drew on his military experience to craft an epic that creatively combined warfaring and wayfaring. Christian is both pilgrim and warrior, and the message of The Pilgrim’s Progress is not only a call to embrace and persist in the Christian life, but also a summons to battle the forces of evil, if necessary by refusing to yield to the state’s demands for religious conformity” (ODNB).
Such was Howe’s ambition, he later published two atlases in the Atlas of the United States (1837) and An Atlas of the Principal Islands of the Globe (1838).
ANB confirms Howe’s legacy: “He has rightly been called the most significant and foresighted figure in the American history of special education. He also participated in the reform of public school education with Horace Mann, in prison reform, in helping the mentally ill with Dorothea Dix, and in the antislavery movement.”
This edition of Pilgrim’s Progress is not listed in the Special Reference Library of Books Relating to the Blind (1907, compiled by Michael Anagnostopoulos) based on the collection (begun by Howe) of the Perkins Institution “this library is the largest in America [of books for and about the blind], and in all the world is second only to the splendid collection in Vienna”, see Foreword) which has a separate section on books printed in Boston Line Type and includes a number of other works produced for the New England Institution for the Education of the Blind (including an edition of Fuller’s Call to the unconverted printed in Boston in 1836).
The ownership inscription reads: “This Book belongs to Daniel Lister 23 Berkeley Square and is lent to the Blind.” Further evidence of Lister’s role in education is found in The Athenaeum journal (no. 650, 11 April, 1840), where his name appears in a notice from the Rev. G.W. Philp of Kew who advertises a boarding school. Lister is one of two people to whom references were to be supplied.
Very rare: not in OCLC, not in Libraryhub, not in KVK.
Provenance: Library at Southwick Hall, Northamptonshire.
Tallis, John, Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace, and the Exhibition of the World’s Industry in 1851 (London, 1852), p.104; Weimer, D., “To Touch a Sighted World” in Winterthur Portfolio Vol. 51, No. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 2017), pp.135-158.
