This late April 1877 volume features singing school songs and a variety of church tunes, including nineteenth-century standards and anthems. Temple Star is the first Ruebush, Kieffer and Company publication issued using the seven-shape notational system devised by Jesse B. Aikin. From the 1850s through the late 1870s, Aikin, William Walker, Joseph Funk, and others passionately championed competing seven-shape notation systems. Funk was the grandfather of the Shenandoah Valley firm’s editor Aldine S. Kieffer (1840–1904) and related by marriage to its bookbinder and manufacturer Ephraim Ruebush (1833–1924). These family ties explain the company’s longstanding allegiance to Funk’s shapes. According to an account from company typesetter Daniel F. Blake, Aikin tried to coerce the company to adopt both his notation style and preferred Philadelphia typographer, J. M. Armstrong & Company, for this publication and the entire Ruebush, Kieffer catalog. In the preface to Temple Star, Kieffer describes the decision to abandon Funk’s shapes in favor of Aikin’s notation system as a strategic choice to unite music publishers and teachers spreading both shape-note music and its Christian message across the South and West.

—Erin Fulton