JULIUS AND HIS FRIEND THE COMPUTER

(Cape Town): (Oxford University Press Southern Africa), 1992. First printing. Near fine.. Scarce first edition children's book on the dawning "infinite possibilities" of assistive computer technologies for children with disabilities, written in both English and the alternative ideographic writing system Blissymbolics. The subject of Chait's story is Julius van der Wat, a real teenager whose photograph and fuller biography follow the main text. As an adult, Van der Wat became an artist and computer assistant, and was later profiled in Michele Shusterman's THE CEREBRAL PALSY TOOL KIT (2015) praising the further advances in assistive computing since the relatively basic interface described in JULIUS: "I use a computer pen that is fastened to my helmet to paint with on the iPad screen [...] I can paint, Facebook, read books and I can even do my own banking now."

Artist Thelma Chait was one of the first female architecture graduates from the University of Cape Town; the illustrations in JULIUS are characteristic of the line drawings in pen and colored inks she became known for in the 1960s and onward. Chait's text is accompanied by interlinear translation in Blissymbolics, a constructed language developed by Charles Bliss as a written auxiliary system with no corresponding spoken language, designed to permit communication between different linguistic groups and first published it in SEMANTOGRAPHY (1949). Blissymbolics was further developed in the 1970s for use as an augmentive and alternative communication (AAC) in disabled children's education, notably in Canada and Sweden; translator Annalu Waller is a professor of computer science at the University of Dundee and leader of the university's AAC Research Group.

Rare. OCLC notes just three locations. None in the US. 8'' x 7''. Original glossy color pictorial wrappers. Illustrated in color by Chait. Unpaginated. Minor toning and edgewear.