On Vision

The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight

by Naomi Cohn

Rose Metal Press, 2024

reviewed by Seana Graham

Another gem of a book from Rose Metal Press. If the author hadn’t described how the book came about in the author’s notes in the back, I might have thought she started the work with Rose Metal Press in mind, delighting as it does in hybrid and offbeat forms of literature of all kinds. Following upon a piece she admired in Rebecca Solnit’s The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness, Naomi Cohn says:

“All I aimed to do was write one essay, maybe a few thousand words, on learning braille as part of adapting to progressive vision loss.” But the piece grew to be a much larger work as she went on and it proved useful in many ways to write it in the form of an encyclopedia, with its many short essays lining up in alphabetical order, starting with “Academia” and ending with “Zutz.”

But as she goes on to say in the author notes, “although form supports, it also distorts.” Form forced her to reexamine some of the medical history attached to her waning eyesight, to speak more of her Jewish background than she originally intended, and in her words, may make her out to be more of an expert than she really thinks she is. “The only authority I fully claim is being expert in my own particular life.” Things are forced out into the open by the constraints of her project. Under the heading “Unseen” she writes “As in how Ray, private, self-effacing, would rather have remained unseen in these pages.”

But let’s get to the book’s design. Let’s start, in fact, with the cover. You will see the title in normal fashion across the front, but you will also see the dots of the braille alphabet, spelling out the same thing. And I know it’s the same thing because, thanks to the letters of the braille alphabet each being represented at the heading of at least one entry, I can now read them. Not as a blind person could, of course. But the dots are slightly raised from the surface of the cover, so that a braille reader can actually read them. And a note about type in the very back tells us that both the cover and the text within are set in fonts that are among the most legible to readers with low vision.

There are two biographies weaving through these texts, one of the author’s own journey with steadily diminishing vision (her blindness is caused by a condition where new blood vessels pierce her retina as they grow, wreaking havoc there), and that of Louis Braille, who as a child accidentally blinded himself in his father’s saddle making shop. He was sent away to a school for the blind in Paris (at that time the only school for the blind in France). At the school the only books available to him were a handful of enormous, heavy books which had huge, embossed letters, the only option for the blind to read. The poignancy of his life, his obscurity and poverty and yet ultimate success at giving the blind a way to read is deftly handled. It doesn’t overwhelm the other topics of the book, and yet the importance of his life and work is overwhelming all the same.

I will not spoil all the little treasures you will come across in this small but vibrant book. Still, I can’t resist bringing up one that brought me to a stop. Cohn is talking about taking a test with the Snellen eye chart and how on different days she achieves different results. On some days, she can make out enough of the blur to pass for 20/200, the cutoff point between the legally sighted and the legally blind.

“I cannot” she says, “break the habit of trying to pass the test.”

Seana Graham is the book review editor at Escape Into Life. She has also reviewed for the biography website Simply Charly. She attempts to keep up with her various blogs, including Confessions of Ignorance, where she tries to learn a little bit more about the many things she does not know. She has published stories in a variety of literary journals. The recent anthology Annihilation Radiation  from Storgy Press, includes one of them. Santa Cruz Noir, a title from Akashic Press, features a story of hers about the city in which she currently resides. 

Get The Braille Encyclopedia at Rose Metal Press

An interview with Naomi Kohn on The Braille Encyclopedia at Electric Lit

Some entries from The Braille Encyclopedia at The Baltimore Review