On my first day working at the Marriott Library’s Rare Book Department at the University of Utah, I was given a tour of the “vault,” where over 80,000 rare books are housed in climate-controlled conditions, ranging from 4,000-year-old Sumerian clay tablets to twenty-first-century artists’ books. In this vault, I noticed a row of eighteen unmarked banker’s boxes containing over 2,000 copies of the Deseret Alphabet First and Second Books. It was clear the boxes had not been opened in many years.

These books are remnants of a the failed attempt by Brigham Young and the early members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to overhaul English spelling into a phonemically consistent system. Despite significant investment, the project never gained traction, and the books sold poorly.

38 Mormon Characters: A Forgotten Chapter in Western Typographic History
Roby Wentz
Los Angeles, CA: Zamorano Club, 1978
BX8643 D4 W46

In 1978, historian Roby Wentz speculated in his Zamorano Club pamphlet, 38 Mormon Characters, that a “cache” of unsold readers “obviously” still existed—here was the evidence before me…

The reason the J. Willard Marriott Library has these volumes is not difficult to assume. The readers were specifically printed and intended for use by the University of Deseret, the precursor to our University of Utah. A February 28, 1868, report in The New York Times suggests that these readers sold poorly and thus left in storage. Since documentation in our institutional records is limited, this remains an educated assumption for now. Likewise, the Church History Library also has a large amount of Deseret Second Books, which indicates there has long been a close partnership between the institutions.

History of the Deseret Alphabet aside (more on that later), this “cache” offers a unique opportunity to conduct a census of printing variations in a nineteenth-century book, providing insight into publishing practices, binding variations, and error rates of the period.

For the Deseret First Books, there is notable variation in spine bindings. They appear in a range of colors—red, blue, pink, and black, among others—and even within the same color, the textures vary unexpectedly. For example, green spines alone show four distinct textures. After counting every color and texture combination across 2,099 copies, I was able to identify a surprising total of thirty-one unique combinations.

To evaluate the statistical significance of this census, we applied standard proportion estimators for a finite population:

The sample of 2,099 Deseret First Books represents 21% of the original 10,000-copy print run. At a 95% confidence level, and applying the finite population correction (FPC = √((N − n) / (N − 1))), this produces a margin of error of approximately ±1.92%.

This allows us to state with high statistical confidence that the binding frequencies observed in this cache closely reflect those of the full production run. For instance, the 44.21% frequency of the dark red “black” fine Morocco binding in the sample suggests that between 42.29% and 46.13% of all originally printed copies likely featured this binding.

Counterexample: These findings assume that the dispersal of books in the original sale occurred randomly. For example, if copies with pink spines were packed together in boxes that were accessed first, their lower representation in our sample could simply reflect how the books were stored and retrieved, rather than their true proportion in the full print run.

Another factor to consider is the 1970 Friends of the University of Utah Libraries event, wherein some readers were given away as gifts. It’s possible that more visually appealing colors—such as red, pink, and blue—were preferentially selected for distribution, which could further skew the observed counts.

The Census

There are 2,099 copies of the Deseret First Book in storage. In this population sample, there is a total of twelve unique colors and twelve unique textures, which creates a combination of thirty-one unique spines. Black, with its four color variations, is the most frequent color at 1,192 copies, representing 56.79% of the entire count. The next largest is blue at 292 individuals representing 13.91%, and so on. The color tan only has a single example. The most frequent texture is the Fine Morocco with 1,630 individuals representing 77.66% of the entire sample. Making a Black Fine Morocco spine the most common by far.

The Hexagon, Crisscross, and Diagonal Wave textures are very rare, with only two to three examples. In fact, most of the combinations are rare. Nineteen combinations have fewer than ten examples in the sample, with a further six occurring in only a single instance: Tan Coarse Cord, dark red “black” beads, dark red “black” hexagons, dark blue “black” beads, light brown fine Morocco, and my personal favorite, the rarest of them all: red polka dots, which does not appear in Tanselle’s work.

Counterexample: It is also worth considering the possibility of custom rebinding. The Polka Dots singleton, for instance, may have been a private individual’s rebinding effort. While none of the books appear to have been rebound at first glance, a more experienced bibliophile might identify details that are not immediately apparent.

There are only 264 copies of the Deseret Second Book in our holdings. Although it is a smaller sample, it still provides useful insight into their variations. Compared to the First Book, there are fewer options overall: seven colors and four textures, resulting in just ten combinations.

A larger cache is reportedly held by the Church History Library, which could help expand this analysis. In our sample, red and light brown are particularly rare, each represented by only a single copy.

A note on black bindings

There are four different colors of “black”: true black, very dark red, very dark green, and very dark blue. These differences are subtle and are best appreciated when viewed side by side, as they can be easily mistaken for standard black. However, these color variations are consistent across hundreds of examples, suggesting they are not the result of uneven discoloration or fading, but rather different batches or types of spine material.

Doubtless, color is often subjective, and there may be some who disagree and want to consider different categorizations. It is true that many of the spines in the sample are dirty, dusty, and faded, but I believe the color hues are consistent enough to warrant separate categories.

A note on the naming of textures

Some of the textures might have seemingly odd names. For example, a very geometric-looking pattern has the bibliographical term “Pansy,” which strikes me as an odd choice, but it appears as if someone thought they resembled the flower. The terms are drawn from Thomas Tanselle’s 1970 article in Studies in Bibliography (pp. 71-102), ‘The Bibliographical Description of Patterns,” and are used here to maintain bibliographic consistency where possible.

That said, some of the textures were difficult to distinguish, as they closely resemble one another. A future bibliographer may choose to refine or reclassify these categories using clearer terminology.

A note on errors

Small off-center printing of the cover was somewhat common, typically with the title image shifted toward the lower left. More substantial misprints occurred in just a few examples.

In the Deseret Second Book, thirteen copies have completely blank front covers paired with four different spine types—an unusual feature whose cause remains unclear. The image shown resembles the blank back cover found on all copies, but in these cases it is actually the front.

Additionally, there is one print error, which resembles the printer running out of ink for a second before finishing its run, exists in only one copy.

Some other considerations

It is also worth noting that the amount of spine cloth extending onto the cover boards varies considerably. In some cases, it extends as much as 3/4 of an inch, while in others it is closer to 1/4 inch. This variation occurs even among copies with the same color and texture.

According to OCLC, the Deseret First and Second Books are held by more than 60-70 institutions. However, no catalog records make any mention of the spine color and texture, meaning this phenomenon is currently underdiscussed and could be updated as a result of these findings.

Why were there one-offs? Were they scrap cloth used in the printing house, or were most of them sold off, leaving a straggler in our collection? The books do not appear to have evidence of later rebinding, so they must have all been produced around the same time by the publisher. Another possibility is that the singletons are publisher’s proofs, produced to provide a sample of the print run before final approval which would make them the earliest printed copies.

A thorough study of the spine colors and textures in private and other institutional hands may yield stronger correlations and even new combinations. At the very least, the abundance of spine differences indicates that standardization was not at the forefront of the publisher’s mind, and they were happy to use any material they had without an eye to consistency. It could also indicate a cheaper production cycle, a corner the early Church may have been all too willing to cut.

If you have a Deseret First or Second Book in your collection, consult the graph to get an idea of just how rare each spine actually is. If you have a texture or color not represented in this sample, you may very well have the only example of that spine in existence. It remains to be seen if there is a suitable collectors market for rare bindings and binding variations of this book, however I would not be surprised to read in the future a dealer choosing to highlight the rarity of their copy’s spine for sale.

To see these rare and colorful variations up close, visit level four of the J. Willard Marriott Library, where approximately 20% of the “cache” is currently on display for Designing Deseret. 

Contributed by Alexander Jolley, Rare Books Assistant

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To learn more about Designing Deseret, visit the Special Collections Exhibition Gallery on Level 4 of the Marriott Library. 

(This exhibition is free and open to the public)

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