#059 Slovakia...Thanks Milos!

This nice cover features Slovakia 0.70 Euro Louis Braille stamp issued in 2009 to commemorate his 200th birthday.

Louis Braille was born on January 4, 1809 in France and he was the inventor of braille,a worldwide system used by blind and visually impaired people for reading and writing. Braille is read by passing the fingers over characters made up of an arrangement of one to six embossed points. It has been adapted to almost every known language.

Louis Braille became blind at the age of 3, when he accidentally poked himself in the eye with a stitching awl, one of his father's workshop tools. The injury wasn't thought to be serious until it got infected. Braille's other eye went blind because of sympathetic ophthalmia.

He died in Paris of tuberculosis in 1852 at the age of 43; his body was disinterred in 1952 (the centenary of his death) and honored with re-interment in the Panthéon in Paris. His system was finally officially recognized in France two years after his death, in 1854.