Boston line letter was a tactile writing system created by Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe in 1835, a popular precursor to the now-standardized

braille Braille (Pronounced: ) is a tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired, including people who are blind, deafblind or who have low vision. It can be read either on embossed paper or by using refreshable braille display ...

History

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the first director of the New England Asylum for the Blind (now

Perkins School for the Blind Perkins School for the Blind, in Watertown, Massachusetts, was founded in 1829 and is the oldest school for the blind in the United States. It has also been known as the Perkins Institution for the Blind. Perkins manufactures its own Perkins Br ...

), studied tactile printing systems in

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located enti ...

and developed his own system of raised type called Boston line letter. Howe's system was similar to raised letters designed by

James Gall James Gall (27 September 1808 – 7 February 1895) was a Scottish clergyman who founded the Carrubbers Close Mission. He was also a cartographer, publisher, sculptor, astronomer and author. In cartography he gives his name to three differen ...

Edinburgh, Scotland Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian on the southern shore of t ...

, in the 1820s. In 1835 Howe printed '' Acts of the Apostles'', the first book produced in Boston line letter. The

letterforms A letterform, letter-form or letter form, is a term used especially in typography, palaeography, calligraphy and epigraphy to mean a letter's shape. A letterform is a type of glyph, which is a specific, concrete way of writing an abstract chara ...

were an angular modification of

Roman letters The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy ...

and had no

capital letters Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing ...

. The first books embossed at the

American Printing House for the Blind The American Printing House for the Blind (APH) is an American non-for-profit corporation in Louisville, Kentucky, promoting independent living for people who are blind and visually impaired. For over 150 years APH has created unique products an ...

in 1866 were in Boston line letter. By 1868,

N.B. Kneass, Jr. (, or ; plural form ) is a Latin phrase meaning "note well". It is often abbreviated as NB, n.b., or with the ligature and first appeared in English writing . In Modern English, it is used, particularly in legal papers, to draw the atten ...

, a printer in

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

, had adapted what became known as a "combined system" which used the lower case forms of Boston line letter and capital letters from a rival tactile system known as Philadelphia Line.{{cite book, title=Braille: Into The Next Millennium, year=2000, publisher=National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, location=Washington, D.C., isbn=0-8444-1021-7, pages=41–46, url=https://www.loc.gov/nls/brailleexhibit/millennium.html Until replaced by dot systems this hybrid form of raised letters was the predominant embossed type for blind people in the United States and the choice of most of the schools.

Notes

Tactile alphabets Latin-script representations Digital typography