Back in the dark ages when there was no such thing as online advertising, Sunstone had to advertise its event on real paper. Sooo clunky. But really pretty. For example, this one for the 1981 symposium.

And I was amazed to find out the high caliber of authors Sunstone was able to bring in even during its early days. For example, Chaim Potok.

Potok was a Hasidic Jewish author who wrote the novel My Name is Asher Lev, about a Hasidic Jewish kid who is wants to be an artist, and how that clashes with his religious community. Every Mormon who has ever read that book could transpose it directly onto Mormon culture. It blew a lot of BYU minds. And we got him to come to Salt Lake!

Then, on the Christian end of things, we lured M. Scott Peck behind the Zion Curtain.

Peck was probably the most popular writer of spiritual psychology during the 1980s, his most popular title being The Road Less Traveled. (Though, I think a lot of Mormons came to this seminar because they thought, with that initial in his name, he must be a general authority.)

Now, the interesting thing about the Potok poster is that it’s the paste-up version, which was the hodgepodge you put together so that the printer could start working with it. You can see something similar going on with the [63] Grondahl cartoon we looked at in the last post.

There are little bits of paper pasted on to cover up a spelling error and a smear of paste on the right side with some notes written in blue pencil around the margins. This is the way things were done in the olden days. And that’s what we’re going to dive into in the next post: The ads that Sunstone published throughout its fifty years—all of which were put together much like the Potok poster.