Reposted from the J. Willard Marriott Library blog.

Step into 19th-century Utah and discover one of the most daring printing experiments in American history with the Rare Books Department’s latest exhibition: “Designing Deseret: Phonetics and Faith in the American West.” Featured in the Special Collections Exhibition Gallery on Level 4 of the J. Willard Marriott Library from now until June 5, 2026, “Designing Deseret” weaves faith, identity, language and typography into a powerful story about a visionary script that still occupies a meaningful place in Utah’s cultural landscape.

The 38-letter Deseret Alphabet is a phonetic writing system developed in the 1850s by leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After settling in the Salt Lake Valley, education quickly became a priority for the growing pioneer community and in 1850, the General Assembly of the State of Deseret created a Board of Regents that established the University of Deseret, today’s University of Utah. Although the school’s first iteration closed after just three academic quarters, the board kept imagining ambitious reforms. One of the boldest was Brigham Young’s call for a new alphabet that would make English easier to learn.

While Young’s idea was ambitious, it was not unique. Throughout the 19th century, many leading thinkers criticized English spelling as confusing and inefficient. Arguably, no individual was as successful as Isaac Pitman, a British educator and spelling reformer best known for the development of phonography, a popular form of shorthand. The roots of the Deseret alphabet can largely be traced to Pitman, who also promoted a phonetic alphabet called phonotypy. Founded on the principle that each sound in the English language should correspond to a distinct character, phonotypy was an inspiration to Young, who advocated for the same type of system.

A key figure in bringing Young’s lofty vision to fruition was George Darling Watt, the first British member of the LDS Church. Watt learned phonography in England and employed the system in church recordkeeping when he migrated to America. After Young asked the Board of Regents to develop a new alphabet, a committee comprised of Parley P. Pratt, Heber C. Kimball and Watt took up the work. They first considered using Pitman’s phonotypy directly, but leaders wanted something distinct. Watt then designed the 38-letter Deseret alphabet, likely drawing on Pitman as well as Greek, Hebrew and Phoenician forms.

But in the 19th century, new alphabets would not spread without metal type. The Deseret News introduced “The New Alphabet” publicly in 1854, and over the next several years, the script appeared in newspapers, books and coins, but printing the alphabet on a large scale proved difficult without type, and the regents struggled to find a font foundry that would manufacture Watt’s font. Eventually, they found a firm in St. Louis by the name of Ladew and Peer that agreed to supply the necessary printing equipment. When it arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1857, the typeface was not to Young’s standards.

It took nearly a decade for the board to find a firm willing to create a case of type that met Young’s exacting specifications. In 1868, Russell Brothers American Steam Printing House delivered 20,000 (10,000 copies each) of the Deseret First and Second Readers to the inhabitants of the Utah Territory.

The Deseret Readers closely resembled the popular primers of their day—which were critical to literacy instruction throughout the 19th century. Young reportedly wanted every child in the territory to have access to the two books, and they were quickly distributed throughout the growing education system. The Deseret alphabet had made it to the classroom.

But the script was not confined to schoolhouses. Supporters also imagined it used as a tool that could bridge language barriers among the territory’s multilingual community. Because the system was phonetic, Young believed it could help represent other forms of speech as missionary work expanded. Eventually, missionaries used the alphabet to transcribe Indigenous languages. Although those efforts never became widespread, they do reveal the scale of the project’s ambition.

In the end, the Deseret alphabet experiment ultimately failed. By the mid-1870s, even Young acknowledged that the alphabet had not caught on. Books printed in the script were costly, unfamiliar and difficult for readers to adopt. In 1875, the Juvenile Instructor publicly noted that the characters were tiring to the eye and hard to read. Later that month, the University of Deseret’s Board of Regents voted to adopt Ben Pitman’s phonotypy instead. After Young’s death in 1877, the church abandoned spelling reform altogether.

By the 20th century, the Deseret alphabet had shifted from a failed reform effort to a cultural artifact. In 1967, a discovery in the Church Historian’s Office brought long-forgotten Deseret manuscripts back to light, sparking renewed interest among historians, collectors, linguists and artists. Not long after, the characters entered the digital age as designers and computer scientists adapted it for modern use. Greg Kearney created one of the first digital Deseret fonts in 1991 for the LDS Church History Department, and John Jenkins of Apple later encoded the characters in Unicode, making the alphabet accessible on computers worldwide. Today, the Deseret alphabet continues to appear in popular culture, from the 1995 film “Plan 10 from Outer Space” to the opening credits of the 2024 film “Heretic.” Its legacy also lives on through contemporary artists such as Ed Bateman, Bob Moss and Dan Christofferson.

In the Marriott Library’s Special Collections Gallery, the story of the Deseret alphabet is brought to life, where it becomes an insightful lens into pioneer education, missionary ambition, book history and the strange afterlife of a persistent though ephemeral piece of Utah’s unique history. The exhibit, “Designing Deseret,” offers a vivid reminder that typography is never just about letters. It is also about the people who imagine what those letters can do.