Two French publishing houses have opened a specialized bookshop in Paris, in the Pantheon area, called the “Librairie des grands caractères”, a way to grant even the visually impaired the luxury of a walk among books.  And  the sensual pleasure of touching and breathing paper.

Customers are those who suffer from vision-related problems, due to disease or age and we are talking of over a million people in a country like France.

And these books are specialò the paper is made so as not to dazzle, the line spacing is studied, the contrast is never excessive, even and the character is not that of traditional books but an ad hoc one, called Luciole.

One more reason not to abandon reading on paper is, in the case of some totally or partially reversible eye diseases, its important rehabilitative power for sight.

Unfortunately the catalogue of books for visually impaired people is still very limited, it has only about 600 titles. 

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“And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash, a hundred yards nearer. Can you imagine a milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground? That was the impression those instant flashes gave. But instead of a milking stool imagine it a great body of machinery on a tripod stand… Seen nearer, the Thing was incredibly strange, for it was no mere insensate machine driving on its way. Machine it was, with a ringing metallic pace, and long, flexible, glittering tentacles (one of which gripped a young pine tree) swinging and rattling about its strange body. It picked its road as it went striding along, and the brazen hood that surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a head looking about. Behind the main body was a huge mass of white metal like a gigantic fisherman’s basket, and puffs of green smoke squirted out from the joints of the limbs as the monster swept by me.”

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Every year on January 1st, many books enter the public domain either because they were published before 1925 (United States) or at least 70 years have passed since the author’s death (European Union and many other countries).

This year it has been discussed a lot that The Great Gatsby is now in the public domain and yes you can download it here for free.

Also very famous are other titles now in the public domain such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, Sugimoto’s A Daughter of the Samurai and John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer.

There are other major titles that have now entered the public domain on January 1st 2021 but have not yet been uploaded online.

These are Dreyser’s An American Tragedy, Hemingway’s In our Time and Aldous Huxley’s Three Barren Leaves. These will be available later this year on sites like the Internet Archive and the Gutenberg project.

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