The Clements Library website includes events, exhibits, subject guides, newsletter issues, library staff, and more.

Home » Adopt a Piece of History » Klemm, “The Relief Practice Map: North America”

Klemm, “The Relief Practice Map: North America”

Maps

$1000

The Relief Practice map : North America by L. R. Klemm Ph.D. New York: William Beverley Harison, 59 Fifth Avenue

The Relief Practice Map: North America was created by L. R. (Louis Richard) Klemm (1845-1925), who was superintendent of schools in Cleveland and Hamilton, Ohio, and later a specialist in foreign education for the United States Bureau of Education in Washington, DC in 1889. He developed the idea of printed tactile maps to engage sighted students kinesthetically, an educational strategy about which he learned in Europe and one that was successful for teaching the blind.

The Relief Practice Map employs raised typography in capital letters, which could be used by the blind, but an announcement for his relief maps focuses on the intention that these blank maps be filled in by any student with place names, rivers, lakes, mountains, etc. As they were portable, they were well suited for use in schools. Klemm had seen the effective use of blank maps in the classroom in Germany and wrote about the construction of relief maps in his European Schools; or, What I Saw in the Schools of Germany, France, Austria, and Switzerland (1890), a process which he patented in 1885. (patent (no. 320,564 dated June 23, 1885) for his “Relief Map, Chart, &c.”)

Klemm does not refer to the earlier relief atlas created specifically for the blind, produced by Samuel Gridley Howe. Howe’s Atlas of the United States Printed for the use of the Blind (1837) initiated embossed printing of maps and letterpress for the blind and visually disabled. The Clements library holds a copy of Howe’s The blind child’s spelling book, which uses embossed letterpress, and also a collection of (4) letters from Howe regarding the Perkins school for the blind in the Manuscript Division.