A zinc cast of the original letter from Helen Keller.
See a larger version of the image below.
In anticipation of our year-long 85th anniversary celebration, NBP staff looked through some historic files and found a wonderful letter to our founder, Francis Ierardi, written by Helen Keller which reads:
Dear Mr. Ierardi:
This note is by way of shaking hands with you over "The Braille Weekly." I congratulate you on such a live magazine for the blind. I find it stimulating and well put together. It is crammed full of interesting and varied subjects. I am particularly glad to have the foreign news and the economic and political notes.
I am also delighted with "Our Special," and I am most grateful to the National Braille Press and other friends who have made this free publication for blind women possible. It cannot but be an aid to them in their home activities. The sightless certainly need a friendly guide in their social relations.
Above all I am happy that these two periodicals are finding their way to an increasing number of the deaf-blind. They mean more to us who are doubly handicapped than to others who only lack sight. Their enlivening pages restore to us as it were the aspects, colors and voices of the light-filled world. They bear us over sea and land wherever we will, and we are free. Gone is the crushing weight of immobility and tedium! Our spirits rise light and glad in the thought that we can still think, read, write and sometimes fill our hungry hands with useful work.
I earnestly hope that more and more people will help you constructively. There should be no trouble about financing such decidedly worthwhile enterprises. And let each contributor remember that with each gift to the deaf-blind are given the few sweet satisfactions they can know in their narrow, monotonous existence.
With kindest greetings and best wishes for the success of the magazines, I am,
Sincerely yours,
Helen Keller
