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This advertisement is from the very first issue of the Improvement Era – November 1897. Chances are that you’ve never heard of the Blickensderfer typewriter. The name seemed familiar to me, though, and I finally found it again, in a letter written by Heber J. Grant in 1928.

During the last months of his life, President Joseph Wilford Booth of the Armenian (formerly Turkish) Mission tried his hand at using a typewriter. The typewriter was old and worn-out, and Pres. Booth’s typing skills were non-existent. He used capitalization arbitrarily, forgot to use the space bar, overstruck his letters, hit the keys with such uneven pressure that some of the letters floated above the line and some sank below. His last letter to Heber J. Grant was so ugly that he apologized and said he wouldn’t be surprised if Pres. Grant threw away the abomination unread.

Pres. Grant’s response to that was: “Certainly your typewritten letter was not thrown into the wastebasket. I know all about making mistakes on typewriters, because for a long time I used the typewriter instead of talking to a dictaphone. I used to carry my little Blickensderfer with me on the train and write my journal on it, and I could make more mistakes in a given length of time than almost anybody.”

There was so much win in that paragraph that the Blickensderfer name looked familiar when I ran across it again.