1. Adventurer

2. Documentarian

3. Philanthropist

4. Mormon

I came to know Goddard in my high school years. Though Goddard died a Californian, he had ties to Utah. A former student at West High School in Salt Lake City, Utah, he returned there periodically with film of his latest adventure. (Goddard was a USC grad too.) I recall several of these episodes. They were fascinating and simultaneously frightening. Most of the girls in the assembly audiences were gaga. Let’s face it. At the time (and he was elderly by today’s standard), John was still stunningly handsome and debonair.

A type of Indiana Jones, he looked, and apparently acted, the part. Goddard served a mission (can’t recall where now) and remained affiliated with Mormonism through his tumultuous career. Did I say his filmed adventures were riveting? Yeah. They were. We always got first crack before he sold them on the lecture circuit or to National Geographic or something.

Goddard’s constant traveling probably contributed to his first and second marriages ending, though I’m not privy to any such information really, just rumors over the years. Oh, and did I say the guy looked like the classic movie star? Yeah.

Well, John, may eternity open new adventures, even a thrill or two. Godspeed brother, and thanks for the vicarious episodes of adrenaline rush.

John Goddard: gone on the last great adventure.

In spite of all the talk about remembering what we feel in a sermon experience, not what we hear, as valid as that may be, it is the text that reigns supreme. Recreating a sermon is not possible. But recording the words spoken on the occasion may be valuable. From the very beginning of Joseph Smith’s career, it was the text that trumped all other things. The Book of Mormon saga places the text in the role of savior, preserver and founder of language and true religion. It was to be expected that Mormons would keep records, and by commandment.

How important is the gap between the experience of a sermon and a text of that sermon? To be sure, there is always a gap. That gap is characterized in different ways by modern textual theory but I think most of us have a sense of what fidelity means when we talk about reporting the spoken word. So, I want to discuss that fidelity just a little from a practical side. Naturally, since this is a Mormon blog, we should focus on Mormons in some sense. So, what are some things that stand between the spoken and written word? Here’s a partial list:

1. Environment.

2. Assignment.

3. Method.

4. Skill.

5. Redaction.

In nineteenth century venues, environment was dictated mostly by chance. How it effected textual fidelity is important but very hard to quantify. Assignment refers to those assigned (either by themselves or someone else) to report and Method means the technique used to record the words of the preacher. Skill defines the ability of the reporter in using the Method. Redaction can happen anytime, but mostly it took place shortly before printing.

The earliest reporters in Mormonism were unskilled longhand writers with varying concepts of what it meant to chronicle events and words. Most gave very brief accounts of devotional or administrative gatherings. Only after some years of struggle and turnover did clerks start to provide more extensive accounts of happenings in these conclaves. The culture of record keeping in early Mormonism had a value system that usually worked like this: it ranked Joseph Smith’s revelations as most important on the scale of needed fidelity.[1] Next were instructions ladled out in council meetings along with the proceedings of Church courts (which could be public conferences). Lowest in the pecking order were sermons or spontaneous testimonies. That culture began to change after 1832 and more firmly with the establishment of the high council system and the publication of the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants. Joseph Smith’s revelations were much less frequent by that time, but his pulpit presence was becoming more robust. Instruction moved to take the place of the formal revelation and sermon and instruction collided to form a less demonstrative and perhaps a more potently informative experience.

During much of Joseph Smith’s lifetime, officially assigned clerks kept sermon records in longhand, with some speedwriters using their own abbreviation systems. A few Saints were acquainted with the Taylor shorthand system, but none were skillful or motivated enough to create anything like word for word transcripts, however we define that elusive goal.[2]

A few years after the large majority of Mormons migrated to Utah, in 1851, men with more skill and a better Method (via Isaac Pitman and his eponymous system) were on board, like George Watt, J. V. Long, and others.[3]

One problem with these shorthand systems was their interpretation. It was an obvious fact, even with Pitman, that the ideal situation was for the reporter to transcribe a speedwriting experience to longhand as soon as possible while things were fresh. Though speed shorthand was an advantage, most reporters suffered from lag problems as well as cryptic errors. Words and even sentences might be skipped simply because it was just too hard to keep up or because Environment intervened.[4] Woodruff’s JS sermon notes may have been kept in, or partly in, Taylor, but it is clear that they didn’t closely match actual words for the most part.

The Utah situation improved in Method and Skill. Still fidelity suffered, sometimes a lot, from the Redaction that took place in the publication process. Where the original shorthand reports survive, comparing them with published reports reveals extensive editing during the process. George Watt’s hand could be heavy on the tiller.[3] Review of sermon reports by preachers in Utah just didn’t happen often, but even if it had, fidelity would still be at issue.

With the invention and use of the typewriter and recording machines, the world of Mormon sermon reporting began a long slow change to the present one of machine transcription, prewritten addresses, and a host of other things[5] including on-the-spot human translation. How fidelity works there is an issue beyond the scope of this post, but translation (the gift of tongues) is still the crux.

——————-
[1] On record keeping and the revelations see Robin Scott Jensen, “‘Rely Upon the Things Which are Written’: Text, Context, and the Creation of Mormon Revelatory Records,” MLIS Thesis, Univ. Wisc.-Milwaukee 2009.

[2] Wilford Woodruff knew the Taylor system, but based on the results he had in using it, he was handicapped both by the vagaries of Taylor and a lack of speed in its use. Method and Skill were likewise against others who knew it (Thomas Bullock used it on occasion). Translating Taylor is problematics for several reasons, not least of which are its lack of vowels and dependence on thickness of stroke.

[3] My thanks to LaJean Carruth for several helpful exchanges on these issues. She has worked extensively with Taylor and Pitman shorthand materials in the Church History Library. See for example the appendix in Staker’s Hearken, O Ye People.

[4] I’m including things like quill problems, or running out of ink, earwax, wind, rain, etc. Nauvoo experiences were often out-of-doors.

[5] The cultural shift that drove men from the ranks of commercial stenography and made women the default in the profession didn’t really affect Church recording (that’s not completely true, staffs in Church headquarters shifted in roughly the same way as commercial ones did -just slower – but that did not apply to recording GA meetings and GC). But the Method inside Church venues mostly followed the trends in America. Church reporters moved to the Gregg system (an 1888 invention that never caught on in Britain for some reason) for example. Court reporter stenotype machines were used in Church settings for a while. It was never practical to require local clerks to use such systems but some did. Courtroom reporting in the US gradually moved on to a system where the court reporter just verbally repeated testimony (“voice writing”), etc. into a device that prevented their own voice from being heard. The voice recording would be transcribed later, now using speech recognition computer software. Still, inside and outside the Church, altogether there remain billions of pages of untranslated shorthand, most of which will never return to English form. No one cares.

Web-reading at its best.

In the case of central leadership, particularly those involved in church business and printing interests, there were specific (now somewhat disguised) revelations that authorized an early group to undertake printing interests for the Mormons with the provision that they could share in any profits accrued from the enterprise. The “Literary Firm” was the result.

Financially, the firm was not successful. Partly this was the result of violent or legal opposition to the Mormons. Nevertheless, printing was always a part of Mormonism. It still maintains a very large printing complex in house, though through its history, the church has farmed out much of its print work, particularly in its operations away from headquarters.

After Joseph Smith moved from New York to Ohio, a printing operation eventually became an order of business, but with revelation directing a “Lamanite Mission” also came the purchase and setup of a printing operation in Independence, Missouri.

Within the church itself, Oliver Cowdery had experience in printing practice via his work with Grandin’s operation and in 1831, the multiplexed William Wines Phelps was converted. Phelps had edited and published three papers prior to joining his fortunes with the little Church of Christ. Phelps was appointed “printer unto the church” and directed to buy press and type in Ohio and see it set up and operated in Missouri. The result was a monthly: The Evening and Morning Star. Phelps was almost elderly when compared to the church leadership of Smith and Cowdery.

By January 1832, Phelps and Cowdery were in Missouri and by the following month they produced the first print job of the fledgling church press: the Star prospectus. In May they did a small print job for none other than future adversary, Lilburn Boggs. The Star began to appear in June 1832 and along with it a “gentile” general interest weekly, the Upper Missouri Advertiser.

However, the point behind the press was really an operation to print further revelations beyond the Book of Mormon. In November 1831, revelation texts were copied into what is now known as Revelation Book 1. That book went with the Lamanite mission. The intent was that Phelps and Cowdery use the press to print and bind ten thousand copies of the revelation collection.[2]

Next: book binding and construction

——————
[1] The system was imperfect and burdensome on the families of absent men. Joseph Smith’s wife experienced threats and moved from house to house, church members not always able or willing to take on more responsibility.

[2] These and further details are found in Peter L. Crawley, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Mormon Church vol. 1:18-9.

[A prerequisite to understanding this post is a solid reading of its base text here.]

In Joseph Smith’s “first” King Follett discourse (March 10, 1844) he codifies a bit of Mormonism that had been fluttering around its edges from the beginning: the transition from beginning the movement to fleshing it out. There are many ways this plays out between 1820 and 1844. As Pete Crawley astutely observed:

It seems clear that this idiosyncratic, informal quality of the theology of the Mormons, this delicate equilibrium between the authoritative and the personal, the canonical and the inspirational, derives from the Church’s earliest years. Mormonism’s first decade saw a fundamental transition, a passage from a loosely organized, anti-creedal, familial group of “seekers” to a Church defined by unique doctrines, led by a prophet. This passage brought a set of the earliest attitudes to the point of equilibrium that has maintained to the present day. Here history is particularly useful, for the features of this equilibrium as well as its importance in the modern Church are illuminated by an examination of the passage that brought it into being.[1]

Crawley paints a picture of Mormonism emerging from a background of restorationism – a going back to basics movement from the likes of Charles Finney and Alex Campbell’s brain-trust (Walter Scott, et al.) eschewing creedal statements in favor of, “the Bible.”[2]

Crawley continues:

Although Mormonism was strikingly primitivistic during its earliest months, it differed from other primitive gospel movements in a number of ways, e.g., in its rejection of the infallibility of the Bible and in its possession of the Book of Mormon, a new volume of scripture. But more fundamentally it differed from them in that in the midst of this egalitarian, anti-creedal group stood a man who spoke with God. Other primitive gospelers—Elias Smith, for example—had initiating visions. Joseph Smith, on the other hand, continued to receive revelations. Inevitably as new converts sought the revealed will of God through him, his stature in the developing church would grow to a point of overwhelming preeminence and his revelations would take on the weight of scripture and become part of an expanding body of dogma. Indeed this extraordinary position of Joseph Smith was explicitly acknowledged the day the Church was formally organized in a revelation which designated him a “seer, a translator, a prophet, an apostle of Jesus Christ” (BofC xxii, D&C 21). Thus embryonic Mormonism embodied intrinsic tensions which over the next eight years would grow to the point of rupture.

Crawley’s “rupture” refers to the eventual wholesale departure of the original New York founders, like the Whitmers and Cowdery. Their dissatisfaction and departure is seen in part as a manifestation of tension based on founding practice and developed hierarchy. David Whitmer, decades later (1885) would claim that he found Joseph’s hierarchical and scriptural innovations both unnecessary and wrong: a departure from the purity of original Mormonism.[3]

To wit:
In Joseph’s March 1844 sermon, he lays out a theology/angelology that portrays his own journey in Mormonism:

1. The Spirit of Elias. Angelic classification whose members act as “openers of the way” or John the Baptist-like characters as well as restorers of authoritative practice, etc. Joseph clearly plays this role with his initial revelations like the First Vision and the Book of Mormon, etc.

2. The Spirit of Elijah. Elijah infuses power, keys, authority, especially the “sealing” power, welding generations into a great familial whole and so on, not simply a harmonizer of family disunity – an expressed view of the Malachi 4 passage in Smith’s time. The first century apostles are Elijah in Joseph’s view. The Elijah spirit (power) can be manifest/used in other ways.

3. The Spirit of Messiah. The creative power, the Christology of Mormonism and the follow-on principle of deification behind much of Joseph’s ideas on the nature of God. Without saying so exactly, Joseph expands on this in the “second” King Follett discourse.

Joseph characterizes these classes in several ways, for example, Elias = John the Baptist, Elijah = the Malachi chap. 4 Elijah, Messiah = Christ (of course).

Elias is the Greek form of Elijah, an idea Joseph clearly understands, taking a second characterization of the class from Malachi chap. 3. The usage is one of dividing roles, not persons. As we shall see, one person could be all three.[4]

The tale is much more complex than this, but this much suffices for the point. Joseph himself is Elias, Elijah, Messiah. Not the class identifier perhaps (although some have argued otherwise in the case of “Elias”), but certainly we see his own career reflected in the way he divides the angelic duty.[5]

Joseph doles out the sealing power: he controls its use. He is Elijah.

Joseph leads the way to exaltation: he is Messiah. He creates/founds the kingdom, a shadow of the creations of God/Christ. Marks the path, etc. While Joseph may have been uncomfortable with that analogic language, it was not an unusual kind of comparison among Mormons (or for that matter in romantic characterizations of men like Luther for example), though they used other words. Brigham Young:

I never had the feeling for one moment, to believe that any man or set of men or beings upon the face of the whole earth had anything to do with [Joseph Smith], for he was superior to them all, and held the keys of salvation over them.

The March 10 sermon has remarkable depths which I have only superficially plumbed in my (as yet unfinished) critical examination in the book. After all, I’m not writing a commentary on JS’s sermons. That is a role I feel uncomfortable in assuming myself. But contextually, it is a rich text, one that deserves much deeper examination than I give here. By that, I don’t mean the standard Mormon scripture chase. This sermon does (presently) unappreciated cultural work in Mormonism despite the paradoxical fact that it has more or less disappeared from view. I’ve been stuck on it for more or less a year and it still yields new ideas. If only we had a descent transcript.[6]
———-
[1] Peter L. Crawley, “The Passage of Mormon Primitivism,” Dialogue, A Journal of Mormon Thought winter 1980, p. 27. Available online at dialoguejournal.com/archive.

[2] Of course, such a move became mired in its own arguments almost immediately.

[3] As Mark Staker has noted, Whitmer’s memory here is pretty selective. For example, see Mark L. Staker, Hearken, O Ye People Kofford, 2010: 152, etc.

[4] Those interested in JS’s use of “Elias” in other ways are referred to Sam Brown’s Dialogue paper “The Prophet Elias Puzzle.” (Fall 2006). Available online at dialoguejournal.com/archives.

[5] We have to remember that JS has a much broader idea of “angel” than might be found among his contemporaries. The biblical angels are none other than post-mortal, (or pre-mortal) manifestations of the prominent biblical figures: Noah = Gabriel (an Elias!), for example. Further, mortals can be invested with the same authoritative positioning (priesthood) found in immortal angelic ministers. They are only different life stages for Joseph. Classifying Joseph with his own angelic parsing is perfectly reasonable.

[6] <grin> I’m not trying to be a snob here. Really. There’s a lot of stuff going on here that defies my own ability to classify. Sam Brown’s paper mentioned above gives some context for how Elijah was seen in antebellum America and that is a good starting point. Elijah still plays a surprisingly visible role in contemporary Christianity as well as Judaism and Islam. He is still an archetype of apocalyptic setting to rights and restoration of glory. The Rabbi’s saw Elijah in a role like that of Enoch.

During Joseph Smith’s life, paper was made in sheets of various sizes. The Book of Mormon manuscript was written on sheets of foolscap folio. The first edition of the Book of Mormon was printed in duodecimo form. Each sheet made a gathering or signature by folding it four times. The original book had about 25 gatherings. Since there were 5,000 copies of the Book of Mormon under contract with E. B. Grandin, this suggests that the whole operation required approximately 125,000 sheets. This also means each leaf measured roughly 5″ x 7 3/8″. Grandin purchased a new set of pica font for the book, but it was not a large enough set to avoid disassembly of each forme, replacement of the type in each tray and then reassembly of a new forme. To speed things up, the original compositor, John Gilbert, received some assistance in the grueling work. Two compositors working together made reference to the manuscript difficult. Hence, at least some printing manuscript pages survive in two pieces. Each compositor had his half.

Page 8 on the left, showing the center of the gathering. Front matter consisted of 4 pages, making a total of 12, a suggestion of the 12mo format. Font style? I don’t know. Scotch?

Next time: the church press.

———————–
[1] And this (plate modification) actually applies to nearly all of Joseph Smith’s known sermons.

With a manuscript before him, the compositor pulled type pieces from the trays, placing the type in a “stick” with an adjustable length corresponding to the desired measure. The type might be assembled upside down, so that the compositor could work from left to right, flattening the learning curve a bit for a shop boy. Naturally, the font had to include “spacing” pieces to create intelligible breaks between words and allow for ease of justifying line ends. Spacing sorts came in different sizes so that as the line neared completion, the compositor could space the words in a way that appeared natural but give uniform appearance. A lead was placed next and then another line. After gathering several lines of text, the compositor slid the type onto the compositing table, often a large flat piece of marble. In a newspaper, for instance, spacing esthetics were secondary to cramming as many words as possible into a line. Hence, one might encounter shrinking leads and even smaller fonts as an article progressed.

When enough pages were set to print a sheet, the chase — a rectangular frame — was placed around the type on the table. Wooden blocks (furniture) and metal wedges (quoins) were used to stabilize and lock the type within the frame. The resulting assembly is called the forme. Occasionally (as parts became worn perhaps or the compositor became tired or inattentive) as the forme was transferred to the press, the type might come loose, creating a terrible mess.

If the press was the very common horizontal flatbed kind,

A Smith Press (the Book of Mormon was printed on a Smith–how’s that for coincidence?). For more examples, go to Briarpress.org/museum.

Next: more on sheets.

———————-
[1] The “nearly” refers to the letters U and J which were relative newcomers to printing.

Systems deploying individual pieces of type appear in Korea about a thousand years ago. Individual characters were carved on clay, and later wooden blocks. These methods were cumbersome in that culture for obvious reasons. Nevertheless, metal type was developed about 1200AD in Asia though it remained a secret from the outside world.

Around the same time, Europeans were using wooden type-blocks to produce things like images of Saints. About 200 years later, around 1440AD, Johannes Gutenberg (1396-1468?) began to experiment with alloys of lead, tin and antimony for type and ink made, not from the water-based materials used by the monks for centuries, but oil-based sticky material (so it would stay on the typeface) colored by a carbon source like lamp-black with mixtures of metals like titanium, copper and lead. Printing became a poisonous enterprise. Ink was produced in batches in Gutenberg’s shop and the recipe varied over time, perhaps intentionally.[1]

Gutenberg’s recipe of lead, antimony and tin for “mono”type was genius. It is still used to cast individual type today.

The Epistle of St. Jerome from Gutenberg’s Bible on paper. (He produced 40 copies on vellum too.)

The first printers were polymaths. They did everything from building the press, designing and making type and ink, to printing and selling the results. Eventually, printing and making the equipment for printing became separate dependent crafts. The printing industry exploded. For the next 400 years, the process was more or less static. There were improvements in type handling, paper and ink making and press design, but essentially the process was the one forged by Gutenberg and his fellow pioneers. And that brings us to 1829 and Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon.

Next: The manual press.

——————-
[1] See, R. N. Schwab, et al. “Cyclotron analysis of the ink in the 42-line Bible,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 77 (1983), 285-315. Most of the evidence points to Gutenberg as the inventor of modern type, though others have been suggested.

Some of these records were kept on loose sheets (not the printing sheets already mentioned) of foolscap folio (here’s another use of the word folio in regard to size) or in books with blank, lined, leaves. There are variants here. At times codices were created by pinning relevant manuscript leaves together with straight pins. Loose pages might be sewn together. Here’s an example (observe that leaves were pinned and unpinned several times):

This is the verso of the first leaf of a short ephemeral codex

Notice that on the upper right corner of the image there are pin holes indicating that this leaf was once attached to others forming a kind of unbound codex. This manuscript “book” begins with the other side of this leaf, the recto side. This impromptu codex has no folios and this is the only verso side that contains writing. In this case, the writing is self-identified: John Grant Lynch copied this bit from the Nauvoo Times and Seasons, sometime in 1855. (Lynch was an Irish convert and emigrated to Utah with his mother and two brothers in 1855. He became a court clerk in 1856 and died in 1860.)

Next, a detour into some Mormon specifics.

Sure. God sees the future, and you are able to choose. Sure.

Hint: It’s an illusion.

The size of a font is expressed in points (72.27 points is an inch). Different letters in a font have different sizes of course, like A and a (bold font used here). So the size usually matches the tallest letter in the font. The computer savvy among readers know about font sizes in relative terms and that a 3pt font is much smaller than a 12pt font. For many years, the point value was expressed by curious and little used terms. For example, 5pt font is named Pearl. 9pt is Bourgeois. 12pt, Pica. 14pt, English.

Next, more font stuff.

This versal was created in software (LaTeX) for a recreation of the Geneva Bible.

Pages don’t actually have page numbers in book-talk. Instead, the ordinal at the bottom or top (or occasionally, side) is called a folio.[1] You’ve probably noticed that some pages, like a title page or copyright page in a book have no folio. Only those pages having folios form the pagination of the book.

Next, Type.

————-
[1] Sometimes, folio is used in a different fashion, as in “Shakespeare’s First Folio.” This is a reference to the dimensions of a book. More rarely, “folio signature” appears. This refers to the number of times a sheet is folded.

Interested parties contact Jeffrey Clark (jhclark at deseret book dot com).

Etc., etc.

I had some questions to ask, but you could sense the room full of high priests was on the edge of their collective seats waiting to spout the usual bits about how agency exists despite foreknowledge.

I exercised my own bit of foreknowledge:

Question to myself: “WVS, what if you found a seam to insert your questions about the assumptions behind these claims? What happens then?”

Myself: “Let’s see, branded as someone who likes to make trouble? Make people question their faith? Confuse them?”

Questioner answers: “All yes.”

Another question to myself in contrafactual mode: “What would be gained by bringing the still-conscious to the brink of paradox?”

Myself: “Perhaps a bit of thought about what they really believe accountability is all about?”

Questioner: “I’m asking the questions here. Pay attention. Suppose you argued thusly:

1. God knows everything, past, present, future.
2. God knows whether you will choose chocolate or strawberry ice cream tonight at the birthday party, even though you haven’t yet decided that important issue yourself.
3. God knows you will choose chocolate.
4. The party rolls around, it’s ice cream time. The choice is placed before you. Chocolate, or strawberry.
5. Might you choose strawberry? No. At the moment of choice, you are not really free to choose strawberry. Your ice cream future is fixed forever and from the beginning of time, even though the party hasn’t happened yet. Otherwise, it could not be known with complete certainty that chocolate will be your pick.
6. It might be calculated that chocolate is more favorable, but if at the moment of choice, either selection is possible, then absolute certainty of the outcome is not possible. No matter how strenuously one argues that ‘just because God sees it, he doesn’t determine it’ it’s still impossible to choose strawberry. God’s vision of the future implies that the future is already here.

Then what?”

Myself: “It’s fast day in this part of the vineyard. I’m hungry, I’ll have some of both.”

Questioner: “Evader, answer the question.”

Myself: “Okay, someone will say I’m trivializing the discussion. And that God doesn’t force anyone to do anything. Yes the last thing is too broad, but then they would pile on with lots of silly tangential questions insinuating that you don’t believe the scriptures, and so on.”

Questioner: “What’s the upside?”

Myself: “Not clear now. Why do you spoil things?”

Questioner: “You’ll thank me later.”