CHICAGO—I stood waiting while the man behind the desk talked on the phone, typing furiously. The emerging pages seemed blank, however, and his eyes were aimed at the wall in front of him. I wondered if he knew I was there, not wanting to interrupt.

I looked around the small, fluorescent-lit room, stacked full with tapes, headphones and large-buttoned tape players, that had been so difficult to find in the massive Chicago Public Library. Finally a woman emerged from a back room and asked who I was. I told her my name and the title of the book I was looking for. “You called about it, right?” she asked. I had called the main library number least a week earlier to find out if they had that book, and hadn’t realized after being transferred several times that by giving my name, I was essentially making an appointment.

“But you’re sighted?” the woman said, only half asking.

“Yes.”

She picked up a large plastic binder of sorts that was sitting on the desk. “Are you a student?” she asked, searching for a reason why anyone who could see would be requesting such a volume. Frankly, I hadn’t realized that the “book” I had to read for my internship with Art Education for the Blind would consist of a series of audio tapes and a spiral bound notebook of tactile drawings. Somehow, I had assumed that “Art History Through Touch and Sound” would be a practical guide to finding resources, not the resource itself. After two years of dealing with Harvard’s system of advising, that assumption seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

I requested a tape player and read the table of contents, printed in large block letters and underscored with Braille. Looking at the series of tapes before me, I quickly understood that it would take a very long time to listen to the book in its entirety. I would have to content myself with concentrating in detail on sections of it, a method that, as an English major, I have learned works quite well with verbose 19th-century novels. I scanned the table of contents and noted the page numbers and tape volumes of the Picasso section. I pressed play, closed my eyes, and began listening to the introduction.

Just as I was settling into a dark reverie with my padded earphones, I heard a voice directly behind me. I started, and the light stung my eyes as I turned my head to see the man from the counter behind me. He asked how I was doing, and like the woman, he prodded to find out why I was using this book.

I returned to my tapes, and began trying to follow along to the audio instructions. I had already looked at the first pages of the notebook, and knew that there was a page identifying the various raised patterns--cross-hatch, dots, vertical lines. There were symbols to identify the top of the page and the doors in an architectural drawing. The tape directed me to a tactile drawing of one of Picasso’s paintings, and my fingers falteringly followed the audio prompts.