All classic Mormon texts were once brand new, of course, and I thought it might be fun to see how these books were advertised when they were new. Hence, this first entry in a new series.
A New Witness for God, by B.H. Roberts, as advertised in the Improvement Era‘s very first issue, November 1897:
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Regrettably, meanies have stolen content from Keepa in the past! I'm confident you will choose honesty and cite this page like this:
MLA: Parshall, Ardis E. "When the Book Was New: A New Witness for God (1897)." Keepapitchin.org, 25 Jan 2016, https://keepapitchinin.org/2016/01/25/when-the-book-was-new-a-new-witness-for-god-1897/.
APA: Parshall, A. (2016, Jan 25). When the Book Was New: A New Witness for God (1897). Keepapitchinin.org. https://keepapitchinin.org/2016/01/25/when-the-book-was-new-a-new-witness-for-god-1897/
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I’m a bit curious about the typesetting. I know we are spoiled by our word-processing abilities today, but I’ve noticed in most pamphlets like this that they had no qualms about breaking words at the end of a line, even when there was space to spare on the next line.
Why wouldn’t they have just pushed ‘HISTORY’ to the next line? Perhaps this was just common practice for the time and our 21st century ideas of good layout don’t apply.
I have no answers, Steve G., but like you I notice that kind of thing. It’s part of what gives something like this its antique flavor.
Presumably for the same reason they have that strange dingbat at the end of the title, the author is centered while the title and other works lines are left justified, and they put a hanging indent on the other works line while putting a rather large first line indent on each of the blurbs (even though all but one was one line long). It’s an interesting style to say the least…
By the way, the “Templeton Block” (Templeton = Temple Town, get it? ha!) where the Era had its headquarters was on the southeast corner of South Temple and Main Street, where Zions Bank stands now. It was a six-story building, very modern for the day, and considered one of the elite addresses for businesses to rent. The business classes of LDS University (so, the forerunner to today’s LDS Business College) had space there, and there was a lecture hall used for all kinds of public addresses. And, when the anarchist bomb exploded in the under-construction-Hotel Utah, all the glass in the Templeton Block windows was shattered. When the Daughters of the American Revolution wouldn’t let Mormon daughters of polygamous parents join, those daughters formed their own society in an organizational meeting at the Templeton. I might be able to dredge up a few more similarly obscure facts about the Templeton, but that’s what comes to mind at the moment.