Louis Braille: A Touch of Genius - Rilegato

Michael Mellor embarked on a biography of Louis Braille when he happened upon several dozen of Braille’s letters on display at l’Institut National de Jeunes Aveugles (INJA), the school in Paris where Braille was a student and teacher. Mellor is editor emeritus of the Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind in New York City. He holds an M.A. in the History of Science from the University of Leeds in England, where he was born.

In the early weeks of 1809, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, and Louis Braille were born. These three remarkable men would lend their brilliance to a century of great change and innovation, but only one escaped fame in his lifetime.Louis Braille was born sighted, and accidentally blinded himself at the age of three. He was fortunate to be sent to Paris to board at one of the world's first schools for blind children. There, at the age of 12, he began to work tirelessly on a revolutionary system of reading and writing by touch. Braille's passion to improve life for "my fellows in misfortune" was the driving force behind his creation of a code of raised dots that gave blind people the gift of literacy for the first time, whether they speak French, Chinese, or Urdu. His collaboration on the invention of the raphigraphe, a precursor to the dot-matrix printer, is further testimony to his creativity and innovativeness.Drawing on primary sources that sort fact from fiction, Louis Braille: A Touch of Genius is the first ever full-color biography to include 31 never-before-translated letters, some written by Braille’s own hand. An extraordinary collection of documents, photographs, and artistic works enhances the bibliographic narrative of the phases of Braille’s life – as a child and student, talented musician, beloved teacher, astute businessman, and genius inventor.