From 1920 through 1960, the English keys for the shorthand plates in the Gregg Writer and Today’s Secretary only appeared in The American Shorthand Teacher (1920-1950) and Business Education World (1950-1990).
Scans of every issue of The American Shorthand Teacher and Business Education World are available as separate magazine issues on the Internet Archive. (They were uploaded in April 2020.)
Please note:
—Business Education World ran from 1950 through 1990. However, the shorthand plate keys disappeared from that magazine starting in September 1960, Volume 41. (I am not sure whether they reappeared in any later volumes.)
—You can download PDF files for separate issues of these magazines for 1920-1961. (The 1925-1961 issues are in the public domain because the copyrights were not renewed.)
—You cannot download PDF files for issues from 1962-1990. You can only check them out for one hour and read them online.
The Internet Archive homepage link for The American Shorthand Teacher and Business Education World (1920-1990) is below. The best way to find particular issues is to filter by year on this page.
https://archive.org/details/pub_business-education-world?sin=&sort=titleSorter&
Wow! Thanks for letting us know! I had no idea!
The shorthand keys are only a few pages in each issue. They are a very small portion of these magazines. I have known about these magazines for years. I went through a great amount of effort to get the shorthand key pages for 1920-1950. Then they suddenly appear on the Internet archives this year. It does not seem to be productive to read those stories from the Gregg Writer magazine without an English Key.
Hello James, where is the link for Gregg writer magazines?
Not many issues of The Gregg Writer are available online. Archive.org and Google Books only have a few issues.
Thanks Paul. It's interesting that the shorthand keys were not published starting in 1960. I wonder why.
I’m not sure if the keys came back sometime after 1961. The issues from 1962 going forward are harder to view because you have to check them out for an hour on the Internet Archive. You can’t download those.
The shorthand key pages are less than 20% of the magazine content. These magazines were obviously made for teachers. Most of the articles are geared toward teaching. There are many ads as well.
I suspect that they moved the English keys out of the Gregg Writer and put them into The American Shorthand Teacher because they didn’t want students to cheat on transcription assignments.
Starting with Business Education World, Volume 41, (September 1960-June 1961), they removed the keys for the shorthand plates for Today’s Secretary. The English keys for the shorthand plates were moved to a special teacher’s edition of Today’s Secretary. The teacher edition had 16 extra pages of material, including the English keys to the shorthand plates in Today’s Secretary. Teachers were probably complaining that students were cheating by using the keys in Business Education World.
Interesting. Thanks for this information. Are there any libraries that have this special edition of Today’s Secretary in their collection, or are these issues lost?