Reading by touch: Scotland's early tactile reading systems

In the nineteenth century, Scotland was at the centre of efforts to make the printed word legible by touch. Before the widespread adoption of braille as the standard tactile writing system used in the UK, Scottish bookmakers devised innovative methods by which blind readers could engage with words 'haptically'. They created new letterforms and alphabets meant to be read by touch instead of sight, they pioneered the use of printing presses to emboss those alphabets, and they supplied hundreds of blind students in institutions across the UK with embossed books on topics ranging from Aesop's Fables to Astronomy.

The accessible writing systems developed in Scotland opened new and exciting avenues of literacy and self-expression to people with visual disabilities. They also represent some of Scotland's most distinctive contributions to the development of tactile literacy in the nineteenth century. These developments were shaped by the crucial roles played by blind practitioners themselves.

Gall's 'Alphabet for the Blind'

The story of embossed books printed in Scotland begins on 26 October 1827. On that day, a printer named James Gall presented a small volume titled 'First Book for Teaching the Art of Reading to the Blind' to the directors of the Edinburgh Asylum for the Relief of the Indigent and Industrious Blind. The book was unlike anything the sighted administrators of the Edinburgh Asylum had seen. Its initial pages were printed using black ink on standard paper, but the later pages featured much thicker paper, almost the consistency of cardboard, into which angular letters were embossed.

These letters, which Gall called his 'Alphabet for the Blind', spelled out The Lord's Prayer, The Apostle's Creed, and several other short religious passages. As he presented them with his 'First Book', Gall explained to the directors of the Asylum that he hoped his new raised alphabet would make the printed word accessible by touch to blind readers of English for the first time. To aid in this effort, Gall promised to publish more embossed books in the coming years.

Gall's plan to print texts meant for reading by touch did not come from nowhere. In the years preceding 1827, Gall had encountered embossed books printed by the 'Institut national des jeunes aveugles' in Paris, where the very first such books were produced starting in 1786. Gall then set about adapting the print technology used to emboss these French-language books.

First, he swapped their cursive raised letters for letters that were sharp, runic, and, he argued, much easier to distinguish from one another by touch. He also cut down on the number of variant letterforms blind readers would need to learn by printing using only lowercase letters. It took Gall several years of tinkering with type sizes and materials at his print shop at 24 Niddry Street in Edinburgh before he landed on a design with which he was happy.

Gall's embossed bookmaking endeavors succeeded in the early 1830s. In 1834, he published an edition of 'The Gospel by St. John' as well as five or six small books meant for use in the classrooms at the Edinburgh Asylum. Next came editions of 'The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Ephesians' and 'The Gospel According to St. Luke'. His success was short-lived, however. Before long, the high cost of publishing embossed books (which required specialised materials and were difficult to distribute) slowed his progress. He had ceased printing in raised letters altogether by 1840.

Though his raised print operation lasted little more than a decade, Gall and the alphabet he designed had a profound influence on later embossed bookmaking practices in Scotland and elsewhere. Samuel Gridley Howe, director of the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, United States, employed an only slightly modified form of Gall's alphabet to become the most prolific embossed bookmaker of the nineteenth century. Gall's ingenuity set the stage for later developments in tactile literacy while offering blind readers of English their first opportunity to engage with printed text by touch.

Alston and the Glasgow Asylum's press

Shortly after Gall started printing embossed books in Edinburgh in 1827, a second raised-letter press began operation in Scotland. This press was based in Glasgow and was run by John Alston, honorary treasurer of the Glasgow Asylum for the Blind. Alston decided to start embossing books at a time when public interest in reading by touch was growing rapidly.

In 1832, inspired by the early success of Gall's alphabet, the Society for the Encouragement of Useful Arts in Scotland announced a competition. The public were asked to submit their ideas for new and even more experimental tactile alphabets. Twenty full alphabets were submitted, and the first prize of twenty sovereigns was awarded to a type founder named Edmund Fry. Alston, who was one of the judges, capitalised on the excitement caused by the competition by designing his own raised alphabet based on Fry's award-winning one.

Like Gall, Alston thought that his new, modified version of Fry's alphabet was a marked improvement on all previous iterations of the tactile alphabet. The letters in his alphabet were simpler than Gall's in that they consisted of clean, upright, sans-serif Roman capitals rather than the angular shapes that filled embossed books produced by Gall.

Alston revealed his work to great fanfare on 26 October 1836 at an exhibition showcasing the work of the Glasgow Asylum to potential donors. At the exhibition, Alston explained that one of the "obvious advantages" of his new tactile alphabet was that it could easily be read by sighted as well as blind readers. "From this time forth," Alston assured his audience, "the blind boy may take his book in his hand, and sit side by side with the boy who sees, in any school in the country!" (The Scottish Guardian, 1837, p. 22–23.)

In arguing that legibility by sighted as well as blind readers was a virtue in a raised alphabet, Alston articulated a view shared by many sighted makers of embossed books in the nineteenth century, as well as some blind ones. To help blind students integrate into mainstream educational contexts, these bookmakers thought embossed books should be useable by the sighted friends, teachers, and parents of blind students. However, this line of thinking ran counter to the preferences expressed by many blind readers themselves. They claimed that the Latin letters used for reading with the eyes were wholly unsuited to the unique sensory needs of reading by touch.

Instead of the "alphabetical" types developed by Gall and Alston, blind readers often expressed a strong preference for "arbitrary" types, which used dots, dashes, triangles, and other non-alphabetical characters to represent the English language. The push and pull between proponents of arbitrary and alphabetical types defined much of nineteenth-century embossed bookmaking, so much so that this period came to be known as "The Battle of the Types" (London Mirror, February 19, 1870). Ultimately, it was braille, a form of arbitrary type first developed in France in the 1820s, that won this battle and became the standard tactile system used not only in the UK but across the world.

Despite the objections made by some of his blind readers, Alston managed to raise the money he needed to print books using his new raised alphabet. Starting in 1837, he began embossing texts in a range of genres: primers and textbooks, religious and moral treatises, musical scores, and collections of poetry. From 1838 to 1840, he undertook the most ambitious project yet attempted by any tactile press: a complete edition of the Bible. Queen Victoria, who had visited the Glasgow Asylum, provided £400 for its publication. Bound in nineteen large volumes and consisting of a staggering 3158 pages of raised print, Alston's edition "placed the complete Bible in the hands of the blind," the 'Glasgow Courier' extolled, "for the first time in the history of literature" (cited in footnote 8, chapter 1 of Vanessa Warne, 'By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture', 2025, p. 186).

John Alston died in 1846, and the press he established at the Glasgow Asylum did not continue operating after his death. However, the books printed there meaningfully expanded what one fellow bookmaker called "the library of the blind" (Metcalf, 1846, p. 44).

Blind bookmakers

The Glasgow Asylum's records from the period between 1837 and 1846 often credit the success of its press to Alston's tenacity as a fundraiser and expertise as a printer. In truth, however, it seems that he oversaw a team of press workers who carried out some of the manual labour required to publish books meant for reading by touch. Printing even one book required hours of careful typesetting as well as the work of skilled artisans who could operate a complicated press machine with enough dexterity to leave an embossed impression in thick paper. At least some of these jobs were carried out by blind people who were or had been students at the Asylum.

Describing the process of printing his landmark edition of the Bible, Alston notes that "there is in the operative department one man and one boy as compositors [workers tasked with setting type], who were taught in the Institution, and one pressman, the ordinary teacher acting as corrector of the press" (Alston, 1846, p. 51). The strong suggestion here is that the two compositors were blind, having been "taught in the Institution," as well as possibly the press worker, all of whom are placed in opposition to the "ordinary" teacher who used his sight to ensure copies of books were printed as intended.

This rare insight into the workings of the Glasgow Asylum press indicates that blind bookmakers were involved in the publication of raised print there, and it aligns the Glasgow Asylum with other institutions who we know employed blind students in the early days of tactile printing. Writing in 1859 about a tour he took of various schools for blind students in England, the physician Thomas Bull noted that printing was "an art for which the blind show particular talent" and that it is taught at these schools "in all its processes of composing, working the press, and distributing the types, with the same accuracy as that of those who can see" (Bull, 1859, p. 47).

He goes on to state that, in his experience, "the blind print or rather emboss all their books" at the institutions he visited (Bull, 1859, p. 48). Indeed, the fact that blind bookmakers not only could but did contribute to the production of embossed books in the nineteenth century is best illustrated by the career of N. B. Kneass Jr. He was a blind man based in Philadelphia, United States, who, after graduating from the Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind, successfully established and ran his own raised-letter press for more than three decades.

While very few firsthand accounts by such nineteenth-century blind bookmakers exist, this fact does not mean they were absent from the craft of bookmaking. Rather, it tells us that institutions like the Glasgow Asylum rarely chose to credit blind compositors, binders, and press workers with the labour of embossing books featuring raised letters.

If, as I suggest, blind people did work in the Glasgow Asylum's press, their labour represents a largely overlooked but hugely important facet of the history of reading by touch in Scotland. As producers as well as consumers of Scottish tactile books, blind people were able to shape a technology of literacy, the embossed book, intended specifically for their use.

The string alphabet

While blind people in nineteenth-century Scotland read by touch primarily using embossed books, they also sought out, and even invented, other methods of reading and writing that were not dependent on the codex format. One such method was 'the string alphabet'. It was designed by two blind men named David McBeath and Robert Milne, both of whom were graduates of the Edinburgh Asylum for the Relief of the Indigent and Industrious Blind. The string alphabet allowed blind users to form and read letters of the alphabet by tying knots in lengths of string or twine.

In 1822, McBeath and Milne published an essay in the 'Edinburgh Philosophical Journal' announcing their invention. As they explained, their system divided the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet into seven classes and assigned each class a distinctive knot. Letters within these classes were further differentiated from one another via a second knot tied nearby, with the distance between the two knots indicating a particular letter within the class.

According to their essay, McBeath and Milne were in the habit of corresponding with each other via the string alphabet along with a select group in Edinburgh to whom they had taught their system. From this original coterie of users, knowledge of the system seems to have travelled well beyond the city.

By 1829, the same year that Louis Braille published his initial 'Procedure for Writing Words, Music, and Plainsong in Dots', at least some students in Glasgow could already read and write using the string alphabet. This fact is attested by records of the yearly exhibitions which the Glasgow Asylum held to showcase the intellectual and manual accomplishments of students and appeal to prospective donors. During these exhibitions, students sang choral pieces, demonstrated their facility in mathematics and geography, and displayed and sold the household wares they had produced.

Between 1829 and 1836, a focal point of the exhibitions was a demonstration by students of their ability to read and write using the string alphabet. Often, one student would compose a message on a length of twine, after which another student would read the message aloud to the audience. As John Alston, who ran these proceedings, assured attendees, the string alphabet was at that very moment the primary means by which students corresponded with one another.

The use of the string alphabet wasn't reserved only for private correspondence, however. Alston told his audience that the Glasgow Asylum owned strings into which were knotted lengthy scriptural passages, including sections of the Gospels of Luke and the Epistle of St. James as well as the whole of Psalm 119. These longer passages called for a dedicated device: a revolving frame that held the knotted twine in coils, allowing the reader to work through it in sequence by turning the frame.

The same exhibition records that teach us about the string alphabet's use at the Glasgow Asylum also chart the decline of this unusual tactile system. In 1835, Alston prefaced the string alphabet portion of the exhibition by expressing his hope that James Gall's recent embossed bookmaking efforts in Edinburgh would soon replace the need for reading and writing with string.

Alston went even further in 1836, calling the string alphabet "ingenious but inconvenient, and, to any great extent, impracticable" (The Scottish Guardian, 1836, p. 15). And by 1838, the public reading portion of the Glasgow Asylum's exhibition was wholly devoted to Alston's own printing efforts, which had just gotten underway, while the string alphabet was nowhere to be found.

Remaining questions and future directions

Alongside Gall and Alston's alphabets and the work of the blind bookmakers at the Glasgow Asylum, the string alphabet warrants a chapter in the history of reading by touch in Scotland. This short-lived technology teaches us that tactile literacy in the nineteenth century involved a range of more surprising, more complex, and more engaging practices than we might at first assume. Yet there are still a number of unanswered questions about the string alphabet.

For instance, how many blind people in Scotland learned to read and write using the string alphabet? When readers and writers corresponded by string, did they send their texts through the post or via some other means? What connections might exist between the string alphabet and other forms of knot-based inscription such as the Andean quipu?

Pressing questions also remain about the work of blind bookmakers in raised-letter presses like that at the Glasgow Asylum. Many of these revolve around the identities and experiences of the blind people who worked in the Glasgow Asylum press. What were their names? Was their labour limited to the press's landmark edition of the Bible, or did they help print other editions? How did they feel about their work embossing books meant for other blind readers?

These questions stand as an opportunity for future researchers studying the history of reading by touch in Scotland. There is much still to learn about this exciting corner of Scottish disability history.