Comments on: John V. Bluth: “Notes Penciled on Scratches of Paper”

By: Clark

Clark — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 17:10:40 +0000

Anyone who prepared a lesson or talk during the last half of the 20th Century would be grateful for this lifetime effort. Missionaries, lesson writers, and (I suspect) the committee who assembled the Topical Guide also probably appreciated the work.

And who can put a value on lives changed for the better?

By: Bookslinger

Bookslinger — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 03:26:49 +0000

I’m sure that those two generations who used the concordance were grateful for it. The concordance allowed them to harvest knowledge from the Doctrine and Covenants, which strengthened them and built up their testimony. Then with that strength and testimony, they taught and strengthened succeeding generations.

There are some passages in the Book of Mormon which indicate that the general population of the Nephites had non-metallic copies of the Brass Plates and the Small Plates of Nephi. Although it would be cool to find some remnant on parchment or skins, those non-metallic copies are long disintegrated.

And who knows, it may be that a nuclear holocaust accompanies the 2nd coming, destroying all computers with electromagnetic pulses. And since it takes computers to design and build computers, we may be without electronic scriptures (or computerized anything) for a generation or two after the 2nd Coming, and we’ll need to dig out those concordances written on dead trees.

By: WVS

WVS — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 23:49:13 +0000

Wow. Thanks for recalling this for moderns. The old log tables of mathematics went away for essentially the same reason. The pains-taking head-bowing work of doing such things a hundred years ago. It’s mind boggling.

By: kevinf

kevinf — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 20:05:39 +0000

I’m old enough to remember using concordances, but I haven’t kept any of those since the early 1980′s and one of our first home PCs that we were able to load a searchable text of the scriptures. Maybe it was a Folio work? Too long ago.

What is most amazing to me about Bluth’s concordance is that it was the work of just one person. I always suspected that it must have been the work of a a committee of folks, dozens, perhaps. Bet even as mainframe computers came into service in the 1950s and 1960s, and then the early PCs, OCR was unknown or extremely unreliable, and someone still had to either type in all the text via a keyboard at a terminal, or before that at a card punch machine, and produce immense stacks of cards that had to be loaded for each run.

I always suspected that Elder McConkie had created his own concordances of the standard works in his head. I was always impressed with his grasp of the detail of the scriptures.

By: Mark B.

Mark B. — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 16:53:48 +0000

I suppose I could have done a search of the digital Doctrine and Covenants, but I was awfully happy to find a reference to 88:90, a verse that had been hanging around the edges of my consciousness for a couple of weeks. What a work, Bro. Bluth! And what a middle name: Vitalis. No greasy kids' stuff for him!

By: J. Stapley

J. Stapley — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 15:33:20 +0000

Thanks Ardis. I remember speaking to a man who had retired, but had spent his life as a librarian who specialized in locating quotations. He had a massive personal collection of reference works. I didn’t ask him what it felt like to have his entire life’s work rendered obsolete…and yet there is no way that it was obsolete for all those that benefited from his expertise for decades.

Also: Healing Baptism! Yay.

By: Doug Hudson

Doug Hudson — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 14:16:04 +0000

Work done in the service of others is always worthwhile. A lovely tribute.