Monumental embossed French grammar printed for the blind

Lhomond, Charles François. Élémens de la grammaire française [...]. Adoptés par le gouvernement, pour les lycées et pour les écoles secondaires. Nouvelle édition.

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An imposing, extremely rare edition, unknown until 2014, when three copies were discovered, one of which was acquired by the Bibliothèque nationale and featured prominently in its exhibition "Éloge de la rareté".

Charles-François Lhomond’s "Elémens de la grammaire française", the most widely used French grammar textbook of the late 18th and 19th centuries, is here issued in a monumental embossed folio edition expressly produced for blind readers at the Hospice impérial des Quinze-Vingts. The work was printed in raised relief by blind compositors at the press of the Institut des Jeunes Aveugles, employing Valentin Haüy’s pioneering system of tactile typography, developed in the 1780s and representing the first successful method of reading through touch prior to the invention of Braille.

This edition was prepared with corrections and additions by a lycée headmaster and formally adopted by the French government for use in lycées and secondary schools, reflecting the Napoleonic state's institutional commitment to standardized education and the inclusion of the blind within it. Produced while Haüy himself was in St Petersburg establishing a sister institute at the request of Tsar Alexander I, the Paris press was then directed by François Lesueur, Haüy’s first blind pupil, making this book a direct artifact of the foundational generation of education for the blind.

Its imposing format, extreme fragility, and the later abandonment of embossed letterpress in favour of Braille account for its near-total disappearance, rendering surviving copies defining survivals of early nineteenth-century social and pedagogical history.