The Gospel According to Saint John (London: The London and Blackheath Association for Embossing the Scripture for the Blind upon Mr Frere’s Principle of the Combination of Elementary Sounds at the Establishment of No 6 Wood Street, Westminster, 1843). Book, Frere type. Dimensions: 270 x 675 x 50mm (open)

RNIB Collection Acc No: L1/6.

Credit: RNIB

Lord Shaftesbury founded The Indigent Blind Visiting Society (IBVS) in 1834 to send out sighted readers to narrate Scripture to poor blind people. The large number of embossed Bibles published in the 1830s-40s attest to the shift that soon took place soon to facilitate a more direct relationship between blind people and Scripture. Indeed, by the 1860s, the IBVS were educating blind people to read embossed books using Frere’s type, and in the 1870s employing blind people to prepare stereotype plates. Frere is credited with improving the system of embossing from stereotyped plates, formed by wire characters soldered upon tin sheets, giving greater control over print runs and additional hardness to relief letters.

A relief image of this work is available in the exhibition.

Object Description:

This book is open on the first page. The left hand page contains the imprint of the reversed embossed frontispiece text. The right hand page contains embossed writing, some in the Roman alphabet, but mainly in a symbolic system. The two lines at the top of the page are printed in the Roman alphabet and read ‘THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO [new line] SAINT JOHN’. The symbolic letters are arranged in rows, each marked by a raised Roman numeral sequentially numbered 1 through to 13 and placed at the start of each row on the left side of the page. The symbolic writing comprises letter characters of equal size in an array of shapes, including semi-circular curves; diagonal lines stretching both from bottom left to top right, and top left to bottom right, circles, dots, horizontal lines [translation not available]. [Description end].