We’re all familiar with icons in the digital world – those simple little pictures that tell us where to click to open, save, cut, paste, search, and delete without any conscious thought. We recognize apps on our desktops more by image than by name anymore.

Well, it turns out that when you notice them, we have many such tiny, useful images in the Mormon past. There are the symbols representing Primary and MIA classes; the seals for the auxiliaries themselves; silhouettes that we easily recognize as Mormon symbols by their very outlines (beehives, temples, baptism, a deacon holding a sacrament tray). Some of them may be the subjects of future posts.

In this post, you’ll see the icons that represented the various departments of the Instructor (successor to the Juvenile Instructor) through much of the 1930s. Unlike the icons on your digital devices, these are not separated from words, but embellish the words they accompany. Some would be recognizable in almost any Western cultural context, while a few are distinctly Mormon.

They’re small. They’re trivial. But I like ’em, and hope you do, too.

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This appears on the opening page of the Instructor proper, after the pages of advertising.

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The Instructor used its “editorial” section for general articles on the gospel, on teaching techniques, on Sunday School history, etc.

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From its beginnings in 1866, the Juvenile Instructor carried two or three editorials in each issue, usually if not always written by editor George Q. Cannon, that commented on then-current issues. By the 1930s, this column had been updated to “Signs of the Time,” and Janne M. Sjodahl wrote short editorials on events and trends that he felt should be of concern to Sunday School teachers.

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This section carried notes and photographs about Sunday Schools outside of the stakes in the Intermountain West. (This section has furnished a great many images for Keepa’s “Latter-day Saint Images” pages.)

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Information aimed at Sunday School Superintendents (they were “superintendents” for decades before they became today’s “presidents”) found a place in this section of the magazine.

Most of the following headings are exactly what you expect from their titles and call for no commentary:

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In this case, “Primary” refers only to the Sunday School class for children about 6 and 7 years of age – it has no reference to the Primary Association with meetings on a weekday.

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The smallest children in Sunday School, ages about 4 and 5, were in the “kindergarten.” The Sunday School generally did not accommodate children younger than that, although in some years a “cradle roll” – equivalent to today’s nursery – did exist.

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While the majority of the magazine was aimed at adults teaching children, this part of the magazine carried stories and puzzles for children to read (or have read to them).

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This was a long-standing department of the magazine publishing the letters, stories, and drawings sent in by children. The name is peculiar. I presume “budget” comes from the old-fashioned, colloquial word (unrelated to finances) that means “a collection of small things” – sometimes, for instance, publications that were in no sense newspapers might have a “budget of news” that was a collection of very short, interesting bits of news, or a column called “Your Kitchen Budget” that contained cooking tips (not necessarily money saving tips, but hints to save time and effort). The Juvenile Instructor may have adopted that term because the contents of this department are very small and unrelated to each other. I’m guessing that “box” might refer to “mailbox,” which was the source for all these juvenile contributions.

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Gee, I seem to have seen the phrase “Funny Bones” around Keepa sometime … can’t recall just how …