Browse Items (16 total)

In “The Story of Childe Charity,” the titular character is a young orphan in the care of her greedy aunt and uncle. Pyle’s ink illustration depicts her in her misfortune, a wistful look on her face as she sits on a stool and gazes at what could be…

This highlight of Merrymind’s broken fiddle is a curious thing to include at the chapter’s conclusion. After Merrymind meets the night-spinners and plays music which frees an entire community from slavish work, Browne writes that “man, woman, and…

Illustrator Katharine Pyle (1863-1938) was the sister of lauded artist Howard Pyle. She studied at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women and the New York Art Students’ League. The Counterpane Fairy was the first success of her career, in which…

Frances Browne (1816-1879) was a writer and poet from Donegal, Ireland. At the age of 18 months, she contracted smallpox and became blind—which is striking given the amount of visual imagery she includes in her writing. Her brothers and sisters read…

These engravings are from an 1819 essay by the director of Paris' institute for the blind. They depict the punches and matrices used to print a twenty-five letter alphabet that was discernible by touch—the two sides of the "u" were separated to…

Not unlike letterpress cases for the sighted, these cases for the blind were organized according to letter, case (upper or lower), signs, accented letters, figures, etc. They were set at a forty-five degree angle so that the letters would not move…

In this story, a Scottish shepherd named Sandie Leslie raises his daughter Elsie alone. The girl falls blind in an accident when the tree she was playing in is struck by lightning. Elsie gradually adjusts to her blindness and learns to speed away…

This book's frontispiece depicts smiling children guiding blind Leonard, taller than the rest and wearing a hat, to sit in their teacher's chair. Leonard then tells of how he became blind with great embellishment and a strangely adult attitude of…

The frontispiece (illustration before the title page) of the book depicts the protagonist, a girl named Snowflower, seated in her magical chair. She grips one of its arms with both hands and looks past the viewer to the right. While we do not see the…

In the chair’s story “Sour and Civil,” a young fisherman named Civil finds himself whisked down into the world of merpeople. This piece illustrates the fear and wonder of this moment; once again, physicality is present in the way Civil grips the boat…