Church Songbooks/Mission B o M's
One of the common practices for children to keep awake in Sacrament meeting was to take a pencil and piece of paper and rub the pencil on the paper with the church hymn book under the paper. The organ piped for the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City were embossed on the front cover of the hymn book so it made for a neat looking picture on the paper. However it wasn’t that entertaining considering the length of the meeting. So older kids would start writing on a page and telling the reader to go to another page where the same thing would happen again and thus keep one flipping through the pages of the book for long stretches of time.
It often made me wonder when I got to the mission field if someone whom had marked up one such hymn book was the one who started missionaries marking the Books Of Mormon with the same style only this time it would lead investigators of the church to specific faith promoting scriptures instead. There was never any rhyme or reason to the markings in the hymn books but the ones in the Books of Mormon were designed specifically to guide the reader through different scriptures, it was just one of those things that just seemed to make sense even though marking the hymn books didn’t.
