A news conference was staged last year to announce that Thomas S. Monson had been called to be the 16th president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Journalists asked the veteran church leader the expected questions about his background and vision for the global religion he now directs. Then one reporter tossed out a curious query. Why, the man wanted to know, did President Monson have such a fondness for the color yellow?
"Yellow is the printer's color," he answered without pausing. "It's the color that gives life to all the other colors."
He went on to explain that yellow is the quickest color to fade on an illustrated print. To this day, President Monson can spot a picture hanging on a wall and know instantly if the yellow is fading.
For almost a half-century, Thomas S. Monson has served full-time in general church leadership. But he has never lost that "printer's instinct" he first honed as a young teen under his father's direction. G. Spencer Monson was a typesetter and printer by trade.
"My father believed in young men learning to work, so I started out with a little job in the printing business after school when I was 13," he told the Church News last August. "I worked each night after school and on Saturday mornings. I have a good work ethic."
The printing lessons President Monson learned in his early days would serve him well during his professional career and throughout his storied ecclesiastical service. Now his lifelong connection to the press and the publishing industry has earned him a place in the Utah Printers Hall of Fame. President Monson and six others — James Dunn, John C. Graham, Roy T. Porte, Loren "Bish" Taylor, James H. Wallis and Brigham Hamilton Young — will be inducted into the hall at a ceremonial dinner Tuesday in Provo.
Young Thomas Monson's printing career was interrupted for a time while he completed a term of active duty in the U.S. Naval Reserve. But soon he was back among the ink, paper and hum of the press. He worked part-time for the Deseret News while studying at the University of Utah. After finishing his business degree in 1948, he began working in the printing and publishing business full-time. He took a job with the Deseret News as assistant classified advertising manager and was promoted to manager of the department a short time later.
The remainder of President Monson's professional career would be defined by printing and publishing. He was appointed an officer of the Newspaper Agency Corporation in 1952 and became sales manager of Deseret News Press the next year. He would later become the assistant general manager at the Deseret News Press.
During this period he developed a reputation as a top-flight leader in the industry. President Monson would serve as president of the Printing Industry of Utah and later as director of the Printing Industries of America. When Salt Lake Community College conferred an honorary doctor of humane letters degree upon President Monson in 1996, it was noted that the church leader helped establish the college's first printing program when the institution, founded in 1948, was known as Utah Technical College.
A church call to preside over the Canadian Mission — he was 31 at the time — demanded a three-year respite from the printing world. But his eventual return to the Beehive State brought with it an offer to be the general manager of the Deseret Press. He accepted.
Thomas Monson was overseeing the Deseret Press in 1963 when he was called, at age 36, to the church's Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Still, his printing expertise and acumen have been enlisted in myriad ways in connection with the printing and publishing interests of the church. President Monson was the chairman of the Deseret News Board of Directors for 19 years and was chairman of the committee responsible for publishing the LDS scriptures, including the 1979 LDS version of the King James Bible and the 1981 triple combination (The Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price).
While serving as chairman of the church's Scriptures Publication Committee, he traveled to England to visit the Cambridge University Press where the LDS scripture editions were being printed. A dozen presses were running simultaneously. His printer sensibilities surfaced and he asked that a sheet be pulled from the press so he could examine it. He spotted an error on the page. Correcting the mistake would require stopping the entire line of presses.
"It wasn't a major error, but I wasn't going to let that go," said President Monson in 2005. He credited the Lord with directing his eyes in the direction of the press that was printing the sheet that contained the error.
President Monson spoke at a banquet in 2005 honoring the producers of the LDS version of the Bible and the Triple Combination. There he named five major contributions he felt he had made as a General Authority. One was the work carried out behind the Iron Curtain culminating in the construction of the Freiburg Germany Temple. The other four listed were all tied to printing and publishing: His chairmanship of the Scripture Publication Committee; the consolidation of the church printing in its own printing plant rather than commercial presses; the renegotiation of the Newspaper Agency Corp. (now Media One) contract between the Deseret News and the Salt Lake Tribune; and his leadership during the production and distribution of the current LDS hymn book.