The newspaper specimen
On 22 August 1857, the Daily Missouri Democrat announced that Ladew, Peers & Co., a venerable type foundry in St. Louis, had completed and shipped punches and matrices for the Deseret Alphabet. Beneath the report, the newspaper printed a specimen of the type. Long presumed lost, the original specimen was recovered by the Illinois Deseret Consortium in 2025 and is republished here for the first time since 1857.
Read the accompanying English text
The Mormon Alphabet.
Below we present the new pica Deseret alphabet, designed to be introduced and exclusively used by the mormons of Salt Lake—consisting of forty-one characters. The punches and matrices of this alphabet have just been finished and shipped by Ladew, Peers & co., of this city. We learn that Messrs. L., P. & co. have supplied the mormon leaders with moulds, &c., which will enable them to manufacture the type out of their old, worn-out English type.
News of the type reached the New York Times four days later (26 August 1857, p. 4) and Harper’s Weekly on 5 September 1857 (p. 566). Only the Missouri Democrat printed the specimen itself.
Making the type
Responsibility for procuring professionally made Deseret type initially fell to apostle Erastus Snow. Despite his publishing experience, the commission remained unfinished when he left St. Louis. His successor, Horace Sunderlin Eldredge of the Seventy, contracted with Ladew, Peers & Co. and appears to have brought the work to completion.
Ladew, Peers & Co. supplied matrices and moulds so that the Saints could cast Deseret type in Utah. According to the newspaper, they could use metal from their worn Roman type to cast the Deseret font.
The Deseret News scripture passages used 38 characters from the St. Louis face. Although punches were engraved for two type sizes, only one appears to have been cast for the newspaper, with larger majuscules and smaller minuscules of the same shapes. Early installments in the News used both cases; later installments used only minuscules.
Characters in the specimen
The St. Louis Specimen departs from the alphabetic order established in earlier exemplars. Its scrambled arrangement, including two duplications and one missing glyph, suggests that the compositor worked without guidance from a Church representative who had knowledge of the standard collation or the sound-values of the characters.
Repeated: dress ⟨𐐇⟩ and his ⟨𐐞⟩. Absent: trap ⟨𐐈⟩. The specimen contains 39 distinct characters. Eight of the glyphs could be manufactured using just four punches, rotated 180°: ⟨𐐑⟩ / ⟨𐐛⟩, ⟨𐐇⟩ / ⟨𐐊⟩, ⟨𐐌⟩ / ⟨𐐐⟩, and ⟨𐐢⟩ / ⟨𐐓⟩. The glyphs for choice ⟨⟩ and mule ⟨𐐧⟩ were not used in the subsequent Deseret News passages. The Missouri Democrat may be the only nineteenth-century publication using this form of the choice glyph.
Repeated in St. Louis Specimen
Surviving punches and proofs
The Church History Library holds the original punches associated with the St. Louis type, along with modern proofs illustrating their faces (CR 244 415).
For the type in use, see the Deseret News scripture passages.
For more information about the St. Louis type and its reception, see Ryan K. Shosted and N. E. Davis (2026), The Deseret Alphabet: A Fixed and Unalterable Sound.