Yesterday’s post was based on a question asked in a letter sent to a general authority. I hoped to sneak by without anyone’s noticing that I didn’t mention any response to that letter. But nooOOOooo! JimD noticed. JimD couldn’t let me get away with it. {grin} So this post is for you, JimD – I’m taking you into the archives with me.

Depending on what survives the years, archives very often have both the incoming and the outgoing correspondence of the figures whose papers they collect. The Brigham Young collection at the Church History Library, for example, has both the original letters that were received by Brigham Young, and the retained copies of letters that he wrote to others. (Visit history.lds.org, click on the link to the Church History Library catalog, search “Brigham Young office papers” — its call number is CR 1234_1 — and then click the “browse collection” button. You’ll see listings for both incoming and outgoing general correspondence, as well as other specialized subcollections.)

Archives – not just CHL, but most archives – seldom file 19th century incoming and outgoing correspondence together. One reason for that is the office technology in use in the 19th century – incoming correspondence is usually loose sheets of paper that can be arranged in an appropriate order and stored in file folders. Outgoing correspondence, however, is very often preserved in bound letterpress copybooks.

Letters for most of the 19th century were written in pen or pencil, by hand; typewriters begin to show up sporadically late in the century, but handwritten letters, even for business offices (not just personal correspondence between friends) persist well into the 20th century. Without photocopiers, without even carbon paper, a letter writer’s best option for keeping a copy of his letters, without having to handwrite a second copy, was to use a letterpress copybook. These were bound books of tissue paper pages; when a letter written in a suitable kind of ink was written, the letter writer (or his clerk) would dampen the underside of a leaf in the book and place the freshly written letter face up under that damp page. The book would be closed and compressed – offices had screw presses that exerted even pressure over the whole surface of the book. This would cause some of the ink of the letter to transfer to the damp tissue paper, and because the letter had been placed under the tissue page, the letter could be read through the tissue in normal order (i.e., it wasn’t a mirror image, as it would have been had you simply put a letter face down on a piece of ordinary paper).

So even when an archives has both incoming and outgoing correspondence, it isn’t easy to file them together, when one side of the correspondence is on loose sheets and the other side is in a bound book. Of course it’s possible to consult both parts of the collection and match up incoming letters with their outgoing responses, but that’s one of the time-consuming facets of archival research.

The answer to JimD’s comment yesterday is that I haven’t yet hunted up the outgoing response to the incoming letter I wrote about. I don’t know precisely what answer the Fountain Green elders were given. I can confirm that J. Stapley’s response there is right – I’ve seen that kind of instruction, and have no doubt that something similar was sent in this case.

Research in correspondence sources often becomes just a little easier once we reach the early years of the 20th century. Even though handwritten letters and letterpress copybooks persist in many cases, carbon paper came into general use by 1910, and more and more offices began to use it. This means that outgoing correspondence, as well as incoming correspondence, was recorded on loose sheets, and can therefore be filed in the same folders, if archives elect to arrange their holdings that way.

Carbon copies, by the way, very often (not always) were made on pastel-colored paper that made it instantly obvious which was an original and which was a copy. LDS Church offices tended to use yellow paper. I’ve seen pastel blue, pink, and green, as well as white. Carbons were generally typed on much thinner paper (sometimes onionskin, sometimes just cheaper, more acidic paper) than expensive printed letterheads.

Modern archives very often use modern staples to fasten a carbon to the incoming letter it is responding to. But staples and staplers are a much more recent invention than carbon copies. When office clerks of the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s fastened papers together, they had a whole range of technologies, still evident in archival collections today.

In the earliest years of the 20th century, clerks used a dab of mucilage in the upper lefthand corner of pages to glue the pages together. Mucilage, a kind of glue, was sold in glass bottles with rubber nipples – you turned the bottle upside down and pressed the rubber nipple against the paper, and a small amount of mucilage would flow out. Papers fastened with mucilage are most often still tightly fastened together a century later; in some cases, though, I’ve seen the mucilage become so dry that simply lifting the corner of the top page to read the page underneath cracks the dried glue so that the pages become unfastened.

The second most common way I’ve seen pages fastened together – a system that was also in use in the 19th century – was to pin papers together with a straight pin – exactly the same kind of pins you use when you sew, or that you find fastening a folded, packaged shirt. While archives tend to remove such pins as they process a collection – there’s a risk of any non-stainless-steel metal rusting and damaging the paper — I do still frequently run across pages pinned together in this way. In a few cases, I’ve seen itty bitty, barely half-inch-long pins used as well as the more common one-inch pins.

Brads are another commonly used fastener from the early 20th century. Those are the metal fasteners that have a round head and two prongs; the prongs are pushed through the papers, then spread in opposite directions. You probably used them in school to fasten a report into a paper cover.

You also occasionally see grommets – metal rings that look like shoelace eyelets. Unlike pins and brads, clerks couldn’t insert grommets with their fingers; they needed a special tool. The grommet, a short metal tube, was pushed through pages and the tool splayed the bottom of the tube so that it gripped the papers.

Staples start becoming common in the ’40s – but apparently at first there was no standard size for staples. You see them in all widths, from tiny staples much narrower than our “tot stapler” size, ranging up to staples about 3/4 of an inch wide. Archives tend to replace old staples with new ones – the old ones rusted, and many, many old documents bear the red stains of rusted staples.

When you as a user of archival collections are allowed to photocopy documents – a privilege that most archives do not permit – you are obligated to be very, very careful with papers that are fastened together by any of these methods. It is very bad behavior to crease pages in the corner where they’re fastened. I’ve developed a rhythm when I photocopy – three fingers of my left hand grip the fastened corner in a way that flattens the papers as much as possible against the copier glass while still supporting the fastening so that it doesn’t fold over; holding the papers that way naturally keeps my left hand under the copier cover so that it doesn’t mash the stapled corner. This care in copying is necessary in part because old paper can be very brittle, and creasing a corner would cause that corner to break off. Using archival material is a bit like using a national park – you don’t want to leave any trace that you were ever there.

So there’s a glimpse of old office technology and a glimpse of modern archival practice. Nothing exclusively Mormon, of course, but a facet of the life of a researcher who uses these materials to uncover stories of the Mormon past.