Duff Tittle was stunned.

An associate athletic director at BYU, Tittle considers himself the unofficial historian of the school's athletic department. After all, he's the one who put together Legacy Hall in the Student Athlete Building.

But here he was in University Archives, wearing white gloves, going through boxes of BYU football memorabilia, and he couldn't believe his eyes.

Orange? BYU football once wore orange?

"Stalwart men and true ... wear the white and ... orange?"

That little tidbit is just one of hundreds of delightful discoveries Tittle came across while researching a new 144-page coffee table scrapbook on BYU football history. It's called "Brigham Young University Football Vault: The History of the Cougars" and will be available in stores for the holidays. An idea born in the offices of Whitman Publishing in Atlanta, Ga., the "College Vault" series is a one-of-a-kind history experience for fans of college football.

Especially for those who think BYU football started when LaVell Edwards took over in 1972. Actually, the Cougars came into being in the early 1890s as "BY Academy" and have a pretty interesting history leading up to the Edwards Era.

"One of the things that's been impressive to us is that the seven schools that had books done on them already are some of the best schools in the history of college football," Tittle said. "In a way, it's a real honor for BYU to be included in that mix. They (Whitman Publishing) were very excited about having us. They were talking in terms of Michigan, Notre Dame, Tennessee, Georgia -- they were putting us in the same sentence as those schools."

Whitman Publishing approached the BYU licensing department in the spring of 2008 and showed them sample books. Tittle was asked to head up the project for BYU, and having spent numerous hours digging up memorabilia for Legacy Hall, he was excited to take the job.

"This gave us the opportunity to go into University Archives and go through all the files," Tittle said. "We took newspaper clippings, letters, memos and other documents and scanned them, photocopied them or took pictures. We got to use all the promotional campaigns we used in the '70s, '80s and '90s to promote our athletes that went to the media. Most of our fans never got the chance to see them."

Tittle said he used maybe 15 percent of the information he discovered while researching for Legacy Hall, so there was plenty of material he had in mind. He also tapped former Cougar Mel Olsen, who had already started a project to research BYU football. After meeting with Tittle, Olsen shifted the focus of his project to the Football Vault, even loaning Tittle his grad student to help on the job.

So what's in the Vault? Besides the expected old and new photographs and a written history of the football program, Whitman Publishing's unique vision also includes photocopies of newspaper clippings, game tickets and promotions tucked into the pages. There's the Ty Detmer tie ("Five good reasons the Heisman Race should end in a Ty") and clever All-American campaigns for Jason Buck and Bart Oates.

"Our sports information office, with Val Hale and Ralph Zobell, was so creative in the 1970s and '80s," Tittle said. "They were just ahead of their time and got a lot of national attention."

And yes, there on page 31, six Cougars lined up in orange-and-blue striped uniforms, circa 1940.

"For two years we wore orange," said Tittle, shaking his head. "The colors have changed a lot over the years. We were more or less a navy blue when we started. In the Marc Lyons era, following Virgil Carter, we went to a light uniform closer to Carolina blue or baby blue and wore that for a few years. Then we went to royal blue when LaVell came along. That era brought in all kinds of things, like the new color and the 'Y' with the oval. For a lot of people, that's Cougar football. But realistically, if you look at the history of the program, we've been a lot of shades -- grey helmets, silver helmets, white helmets with two big navy stripes down the middle."

Tittle met with both current head coach Bronco Mendenhall and Edwards to get their blessing on the project.

"I showed Bronco the sample books," Tittle said. "He asked me what other schools had done this and I told him. He said it looked like an honor to be selected and asked what I needed him to do. They wanted the current coach to write the foreward and Bronco said, 'Great, let's do it.' "

Edwards also participated, writing the afterward.

Tittle said he talked to his counterpart at Notre Dame, John Heisler, who worked on the Irish version of the Vault series.

"John said there are about 70 books written on the history of Notre Dame football," Tittle said. "If we worked really hard, we could come up with maybe 10 on BYU football. John said there was nothing like this out there on Notre Dame football, so if it was unique to Notre Dame, it was going to be unique for us."

Sales started out a little slow with the first few Vault books until Whitman Publishing started marketing them, according to Tittle.

"They're really gaining momentum and they'll be into 40 books by summer of next year," he said. "We'll be in that first 15 books and we're really excited about that. It's a neat thing. The more we got into it, the more memorabilia we found, the more exciting it got. I was thinking that we had stuff no one had ever seen before."

Today (Nov. 15) is the release date for the book and it should be in stores four or five days later around the country. The Vault retails for $49.95 and will first be found in the BYU Bookstore, available also online. Other stores where fans can find the book will be Barnes and Noble, Borders, Walmart, Costco and Sam's Club, as well as Amazon online.

• Daily Herald Sports Editor Darnell Dickson can be reached at 344-2555 or by e-mail at ddickson@heraldextra.com