American Printing House for the Blind history

Kentucky's general assembly passed an act establishing the company, and a space for it was set aside in the basement of the Kentucky Institution for the Education of the Blind. It was not until 1860 that APH collected its first funds, an appropriation of $1,000 each from Kentucky and Mississippi.

The company used the money to buy an embossing press, but with the advent of the Civil War, APH's funding vanished, and the press did not become active until 1866.

The big boost to the fledgling press came when the United States Congress passed an act in 1879 that provided an annual subsidy to APH. The Act to Promote the Education of the Blind selected the firm to receive funds to make embossed books and other materials for blind students.

Some figures from 1922 show the enormous difference in price between braille and ink books: $.85 for Pilgrim's Progress in ink, versus $21.15 for braille, $1.75 for Huckleberry Finn in ink, compared to $31.10 in braille.

APH superintendent E. E. Bramlette was a member of a consulting group that toured braille presses in England, France, Germany, and Austria in 1924.

After a successful national fundraising campaign, the first braille edition of Reader's Digest came out in September 1928.

In 1936, APH obtained permission to publish books for children in the Talking Book format.

By 1952, it was printing and distributing over 50 different magazines in braille.

By 1972, the Printing House was manufacturing around 45,000 copies of large type books annually, comprising close to 500 different titles.

A similarly ambitious project was the 1984 publication of the first voice-indexed dictionary for the blind.

CARL was updated in 1993 to include databases from hundreds of other agencies, and it was renamed CARL ET AL. The data base indexed approximately 120,000 titles, and was available to individuals, school systems, libraries, and educators across the United States and Canada.