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Thursday, May 27, 2021

Thursday Thoughts...

There is a wonder in reading Braille that the sighted will never know: to touch words and have them touch you back. 

Jim Fiebig

I understand that Jim Fiebig was a business man, and a gemstone lover; I am yet to determine his connection to Braille, low vision or blindness, yet I think he says something rather wonderful about words and reading using Braille.

Many of us are tactile, we love the process of holding and touching cloth and paper with our hands.  It is one of the ways we experience things, by reaching out to touch them

I had never stopped to think about reading Braille offering this unique and special delight - the touching of words.  Of words touching one back.  It adds another dimension entirely to the joy of reading.   

It seems to me this interaction, call and response almost is a wonderful addition to the reading process

One of the things I love about traditional letterpress is that it is about making words with your hands; the haptic nature of word making.

And in Braille we learn the haptic nature of reading.


Hand stitched peace from the book 'The Nurses'

4 comments:

  1. in my experience, the best nurses have an enhanced sense of touch ... they can lay hands on a patient and feel the need or injury or disease process within

    how perfect, then, to represent them with text embedded within textural elements ... although for the life of me I can scarcely imagine how one might emboss/deboss paper with barbed wire!

    last, thank you for the link back seven years to your book ... my eye caught on the cunning "water pipe" within the barbed wire framework

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    1. I think the hands can intuit a lot too. Now I realise I was less than accurate in my description of the emboss/deboss. I traced a photograph of barbed wire and cut a template in order to do it . You are right I did have a go with the real thing but that was not going to work without major damage to paper and to presses! Go well

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  2. such beautiful stitching, I remember being so deeply moved by Helen Keller's brave story as a young girl

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    1. Thanks Mo - an early effort but with a lovely flow.

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