This is truly a remarkable story.
Her name is Amanda Baggs and her blog is Ballastexistenz. She describes herself as “a non-speaking physically disabled and autistic woman who’s lived in institutions, whose income comes from a disability check, and whose services are funded by the state.”
She is also a book collector. From a recent post on her blog comes this:
“One of my hobbies is collecting books by autistic people. At this point, I don’t even always read them, but I love to obtain them, put them on the shelf, and keep them in order.”
Those words can only originate from a book collector.
Here current challenge is devising a searchable index for the library “so that other autistic people (or other interested people) can pick out books more easily by any of a number of subjects.”
At the end of the bibliography she has compiled come these “interesting facts”:
-Autistic people write books. This shouldn’t surprise people anymore, but it often does.
-The first book I can find written by an autistic author is Understand: Fifty Memowriter Poems by David Eastham, published in 1985. Eastham died tragically in 1988, but more of his work was published posthumously along with a biography by his mother.
-Claims that there are fewer autism-related books by male autistic authors are false. As of the original compilation of this list in early 2003, there have been slightly more books by male autistic authors than female autistic authors published in English. However, a lot of books by male authors have gone out of print, and almost no books by female authors have gone out of print. Female authors also tend to be more well-known.
-Claims that books by male authors are a recent occurrence are false. The above statements have been true since the beginning, and the main problem seems to be staying in print and obscurity of the publication.
-Tony Attwood claims that Lucy Blackman’s book is different than others because she has never used speech, but several books before hers have been written by autistic people who have never used speech. Among the other authors are David Eastham, Adriana Rocha, and Birger Sellin. David Eastham wrote the first one of anyone, speaking or not. There are even more non-speaking authors who have no books published in English, and there are other authors who do not use speech despite using it in the past.
-Aquamarine Blue 5 got its title from the synaesthesia of one of the contributing authors. I find myself forced to disagree vigorously. 5 is not aquamarine blue. 5 is brown. The only thing in real life the color of a 5 is a dog turd. The only blue number is 4, and in order to get the color on the cover of that book one would have to mix the colors of K and J. 😉 More information on synaesthesia can be found here.
Some more bibliographic information on the library from a post in May of 2006
There are 125 books by 70 authors.
40 of the authors are male, 1 of the authors is intersexed, and 29 of the authors are female.
73 of the books were written by males, 1 of the books was written by an intersexed person, and 51 of the books were written by females.
33 of the authors are diagnosed with autism, and 37 with Asperger’s.
67 of the books were written by people diagnosed with autism, and 58 of the books were written by people diagnosed with Asperger’s.
Among authors, there were 19 males diagnosed with autism, and 13 females diagnosed with autism. There was 1 intersexed person diagnosed with autism. There were 21 males diagnosed with Asperger’s and 16 females diagnosed with Asperger’s.
Among books, there were 36 by males diagnosed with autism, 30 by females diagnosed with autism, and 1 by an intersexed person diagnosed with autism. There were 37 written by males diagnosed with Asperger’s, and 21 written by females diagnosed with Asperger’s.
16 of the authors diagnosed with autism could not speak (17 could speak). 12 of the non-speaking authors were male and 4 were female.
25 of the books by authors diagnosed with autism were written by people who could not speak (42 by people who could speak). 21 of them were written by males and 4 were written by females.
What an amazing woman. With all these Book Collecting contests being undertaken by universities these days I wonder if there is a place in the book world where she can be awarded for her amazing achievement.