I discovered a few days ago that the Church History Library has made three volumes of its Historian’s Office Letterpress Copybooks available online through its catalog. (To find it, visit this link, select one of the three volumes listed according to the years you want to search; click “View Digital Object” (it’s at the top of the right-hand column). This will open up the scan. It’s a little awkward to find what you want until you get the hang of it, but there are several ways of navigating through the images – you can choose a subset of images (“files 1-20,” “files 21-40,” etc.) if you happen to know where you want to go from a previous visit to the site; or you can slide rapidly through the volume with the slider at the bottom of the screen, or click image by image with the right and left arrows, also at the bottom of the screen.

“Letterpress copybooks” were bound volumes of tissue paper. When a letter was written in a compatible kind of ink, a page in the copybook could be dampened, the fresh letter inserted against the dampened sheet (with water-resistant oilcloth protecting the sheets before and after), and the volume was put into a letterpress – a contraption with a screw like a vise that forced the book tightly closed. The dampness and pressure caused the tissue paper to pick up an impression of the letter, by actually lifting a bit of ink off of the page. If you visualize how this worked, you’ll realize that the impression in the copybook would be a mirror image of the letter – but because the copybook was made up of tissue sheets, you could read the copy through the tissue, with everything appearing in proper order. That seems clumsy to us in the digital age – or even in the carbon-paper age – but it was the first workable solution to keeping an actual duplicate image of a letter that was written: you didn’t have to make a second copy of your letter by hand to keep it in your files.

Historians love letterpress copybooks – they’re almost as good as having the original letter, with no errors made in recopying.

Historians hate letterpress copybooks – they’re often illegible, when too much or too little water was used to dampen a page, or when those oilcloth protectors weren’t used so that ink bleeds through from one page to another. Because the pages were of tissue, they weren’t stiff enough to hold their shape – copybooks that weren’t stored properly are often tangled masses of crinkled and interlocked pages wadded together at the spine where they all collapsed together when the book was stored spine down.

By the very late 19th century, some people were using typewriters, with inked ribbons that could be made to work with copybooks. Some of the copybooks of letters by some Church leaders – Heber J. Grant, Francis M. Lyman, J. Golden Kimball, Asahel Woodruff, Joseph Fielding Smith among them – are a joy to read because they’re neat and legible, at least as good as carbon copies and often as good as photocopies.

But most letterpress copybooks retain copies of handwritten letters, so you have the challenge of reading the handwriting as well as the challenge of making out sometimes blurry, sometimes faint, imperfect letterpress copies. Still, for someone like me who finds correspondence to be the most candid, most immediate source of history imaginable, discovering a new letterpress copybook is just about as good as it gets.

I had read through hundreds of pages of 1856-1959 correspondence in the Historian’s Office letterpress copybooks years ago when I was helping Bill MacKinnon locate Mormon sources for his magisterial documentary history of the Utah War, At Sword’s Point part I, and part II – but somehow I never found the time while I was in the Library to continue the patient page-by-page search of those volumes. Since discovering they are online, though, I’ve spent several thrilling – yes, to me it is thrilling! – hours exploring the images.

What is in these volumes? Well, they are the outgoing letters of the Church Historian’s Office, a more significant, more potent driver of 19th century history than most of us realize. They also include minutes, petitions, and other documents that were prepared in the Historian’s Office. George A. Smith also used the copybooks to preserve copies of his personal correspondence to distant family and friends, letters that weren’t strictly Historian’s Office business. You see Wilford Woodruff working on the Church history, writing to old-time members, sometimes the widows or children of people involved in important events, where Woodruff solicits their help in tracking down historical details – while the books don’t contain any replies received to these queries, you can still see what the historians thought was essential to their record, and they sometimes summarize their view of an event, asking whether it is correct or can be added to. When the historian was absent for a time from Salt Lake City, an assistant would summarize the news from Salt Lake and from American newspapers newly arrived in Salt Lake to be forwarded to Provo or St. George or wherever George A. Smith might be – and the assistant sometimes adds pungent commentary that was not intended for public consumption. You find letters to such notables as Thomas L. Kane, or George Q. Cannon or John M. Bernhisel in the East, with requests or instructions that, again, were not intended for public awareness at the time. It’s just a snapshot – a one-sided snapshot – of all that was happening at the Church center.

In my case, using letters like this can send me off hunting a story I had never run across before. Curiosity almost compels me to hunt up the response to an interesting letter, or at least the outcome of a suggestion or complaint. I’ve already pulled a dozen letters from this collection that will make Keepa posts in the future – including posts about the earliest days of Church history, a time I don’t often write about on Keepa because I don’t often know anything that isn’t general knowledge about Kirtland or Jackson County or Nauvoo. But when Wilford Woodruff writes to David Whitmer asking a question about early events, events about which I know no more than any other typical Mormon, I find stories that are new to me and perhaps might be new to you.

I’ll put up another post later today based on a paragraph found in one letter as an illustration – not an earth-shattering breath-taking discovery, certainly, but one of those background stories that has some resonance today and helps us better understand what our spiritual or biological ancestors lived with.

And any new and easily-searched source of history is worth cheering, isn’t it? Three cheers for the Church History Library’s decision to put these letterpress copybooks online!!! If you poke through them and discover anything of particular interest, or something you would like to know more about, leave a comment or drop me an email at AEParshall at aol dot com and maybe together we can put together a post.