Following the 1847 establishment of a community in the Salt Lake Valley by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Church leaders established the University of Deseret. Its Board of Regents was made up of many of the Church’s leading figures and held its meetings in Brigham Young’s offices. Their purpose was to establish a curriculum for the territory with a special focus on assimilating waves of emigrants. Many converts left homes in Europe to travel to Utah. Brigham Young feared that an influx of non-English speakers would create fissures in the budding Mormon community. To avoid this, Church leaders were determined to shift to a new alphabet. They also saw this as part of a radical break with established Anglo-American tradition. In 1854 Brigham Young put his weight behind a proposal to develop a new set of characters rather than use any pre-existing alternative alphabets. Thus the Deseret Alphabet was born.
Despite some initial excitement, efforts to install the new alphabet were hamstrung by a lack of type. Punches and matrices were secured from St. Louis, Missouri in late 1859 but Brigham Young despised the font and it was shelved. After another decade of on-again, off-again discussions, Utah’s territorial government acquired two readers in the Deseret Alphabet from Russell Brothers American Steam Printing Company in 1868. In 1869, 8000 parts of the Book of Mormon and 500 full copies were also printed by Russell Brothers. Once the books were shipped to Utah, only a few hundred copies were sold. The project is traditionally viewed as a failure. The Deseret Alphabet today is a relic of Mormon exceptionalism, but it has also become a means for linguists to study the historical development of English in Utah. Artists use the Deseret Alphabet as a lens into Utah’s culture and identity. Interest in the alphabet from academics and computer scientists led to the Deseret Alphabet’s adoption into Unicode in 2001. This presentation will delve into the history and use of the Deseret Alphabet.
A presentation by Greg Seppi, curator of the 19th and 20th Century Americana Collection, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University
**The Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Lecture on the History of the Book Trade in California and the West