History
Moon type, in short
Moon is a way of writing that you read by touch. The letters are raised lines pressed into thick paper. You follow them with a fingertip.
This page is a short introduction. It is written in plain English, because the people this writing system was made for should not need a specialist to explain it to them. If you want the sources behind every claim, they are on the research page.
The man
A blind man who could not get on with braille
William Moon was born in England in 1818. He lost the sight of one eye as a child, and the other in his twenties. He tried the raised alphabets of his day and found them hard. Braille existed, but its dots are small, and a hand that has done heavy work, or a hand that is simply older, cannot always feel them.
So in 1845 he published his own alphabet. He kept the letters that a person who had once read print would recognise straight away, and replaced the rest with simple shapes. Then he spent the rest of his life printing books in it. He died in 1894.
A biography written four years later is free to read, and it is where much of what this project knows about the printing comes from.
The letters
Eight shapes is the whole alphabet
Moon's idea was that a reader should have very little to learn. There are only eight basic shapes. Turn one of them a quarter turn and it becomes a different letter.
Here is one shape, in its four positions. It is a sharp angle, and it gives four letters:
The four lettersThe one shape, turned
- A V K X
Nine of the twenty-six letters are Roman letters left alone — C, I, J, L, O, U, V and a few more. Somebody who has read print before already knows those. The alphabet page shows all eight shapes and all twenty-six letters.
The page
Lines that turn back on themselves
Old Moon books do something print never does. The first line runs left to right. The next line runs right to left. A raised bracket at the end of each line takes the finger round the corner, so it never has to leave the paper and hunt for where the next line begins.
Moon explains it in one sentence on his own alphabet sheet: the second line is read backwards “to prevent the reader losing his place; the brackets guide the finger from line to line”.
The books
Four hundred and seventy-six languages
Moon printed with metal type from 1847, then from metal plates, in a works in Brighton. By the time of his death his alphabet had been adapted for 476 languages and dialects — mostly short pieces of scripture on single sheets, but 191 full titles in 40 languages, including Arabic, Swedish, Tamil, Welsh, Armenian and one chapter in Portuguese.
The books are enormous. A raised page holds very few words, so a novel runs to many volumes: a library list from 1910 has Ivanhoe in eight volumes and a history of England in twenty-two. By 1941 the Library of Congress was placing Moon books in twenty-four American libraries, and the monthly Moon Magazine was still arriving.
What changed
Moon has been revised more than once
This matters if you pick up an old book: it may not use the system a modern chart shows.
Numbers, three times
Hooked “star” numerals from 1847; ordinary-looking figures from 1880; and from 1937 the system in use now — a sign meaning “a number follows”, then the letters A to J.
Short forms, added later
Moon himself argued against shortening. His own sheet has only a few. The long list of shortened words is a later addition, and an American library was still printing Moon with every letter in 1914.
Reading direction
Books alternated line direction until 1990, when the RNIB settled on left to right for everything.
Dots instead of lines
Since the 1990s Moon has also been made on braille machines, as a five-by-five pattern of dots. Readers manage it about as well as the printed lines.
Today
A small number of readers, and very few books
In 2009 the RNIB reported about 1,750 Moon titles in its library and around 240 active borrowers, though a quarter of those were schools and societies rather than individuals. It had stopped producing new Moon. In Australia, an association in Queensland had started again, for fourteen readers. New Zealand had given its collection away.
The year before, the RNIB had put the number of Moon readers in the United Kingdom at about 400, and had asked the obvious question: is Moon still the right answer for people who cannot manage braille? Its own review found real evidence that Moon is easier to learn for a former print reader, and easier to feel for someone whose fingertips have lost sensitivity — and also that there is almost nothing to read.
That is the gap this font is aimed at. It cannot print a book. It can let a teacher, a volunteer or a library make a page, a label or a worksheet without setting every letter by hand.
Elsewhere
Where to see the real thing
This site shows Moon drawn by a font. Photographs of real embossed pages, printing plates and machines belong to the institutions that hold them, so they are linked here rather than copied.
- The Perkins School archive's Moon album — alphabet cards, finger exercises, embossed pages and a Moon writing machine.
- Moon's own Light for the Blind, 1877, digitised in full by the Wellcome Collection.
- A page of Moon in Taiwanese, printed in 1888, held by the University of Glasgow — a version of the alphabet nobody had recorded until recently.