Weltatlas für Blinde

Extremely rare tactile atlas for the blind, prepared by Johannes Scheuer, teacher for the blind in Hannover and intended to be used in the German schools for the blind.

The plastic maps were made using the vacuum pressure process. The plastic foil was heated and pressed onto the base map with the help of vacuum, creating desired embossed relief. The maps are bound in a standart ring binder from which the maps can be extracted for ease of use. Presumably any sort of formal book binding would not have been appreciated by its audience and only would have increased its price. The atlas contains altogether 85 individual maps (all other sources mention 84 maps) + a legend sheet with the map symbols. The map symbols include border lines, rivers, canals, water bodies, a set of rugged patterns representing hilly and mountainous areas with over 1000, 2000 and 3000 meters of altitude (the more rugged, the higher the altitude) and desserts. The highest peaks of the mountainous areas are often marked with a tangible sharp spike. Among other symbols used there are dotted lines for highways (die Autobahns) and oil pipelines, short double paralel lines for mountain passes, latitude and longitude marks, and generic place symbols used for marking the exact locations of important places.

There are three main types of maps in this atlas: physical maps showing topography and rivers, political maps showing political borders and locations of cities and "thematic" maps showing the locations and products of industry and agriculture. Most of the map labels (except labels of political districts on some German maps) are shortened to only 1-2 initial letters in braille, which are explained in a separately published volume. The maps are numbered and each map has also it's name placed in a cartouche.

Tha atlas consists of:

• 18 maps of Germany
• 31 maps of Europe
• 12 maps of Asia
• 3 maps of Australia and New Zealand
• 6 maps of Africa
• 6 maps of North America
• 4 maps of Latin America
• 2 maps of the poles
• 1 map of the Atlantic Ocean
• 1 map of the Pacific oceans
• 1 world map