Mark Hofmann

Mark Hofmann was born in Salt Lake City in 1954, raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and served a mission in England while privately concluding, by his later account, that the church's claims were false. He kept the conclusion to himself and found a more profitable use for it. Surfacing in 1980 as a rare documents dealer with an uncanny gift for discovery, he produced within five years a stream of finds that rewrote early Mormon history: the Anthon Transcript, the Joseph Smith III blessing naming the prophet's son as successor, and in 1984 the Salamander Letter, in which the treasure seeking milieu of Joseph Smith's youth intrudes into the foundation story, a white salamander in place of the angel Moroni.

Every one was a forgery. Hofmann's technique, homemade iron gall inks, period paper harvested from old books, artificial aging that fooled repeated examination, was joined to a sharper insight: he forged what buyers most needed to exist, whether collectors, historians or a church with an interest in containing embarrassing documents. Sales to and through figures close to LDS leadership later became their own controversy. By 1985 he was overextended on promised discoveries, including a fictitious McLellin collection, and facing exposure. In October of that year, pipe bombs he built killed collector Steven Christensen and Kathy Sheets, wife of Christensen's former employer; a third bomb injured Hofmann himself, and the investigation that followed unraveled everything.

The Hofmann case is recorded in this atlas for what it did to the source record of a living religion. His forgeries entered scholarship: the Salamander Letter and its siblings were cited, anthologized and argued over by historians of Mormonism before forensic examiner George Throckmorton and his colleagues demonstrated in 1986, through the microscopic cracking of the artificially aged ink, that the corpus was fake. Documentary history of the Latter Day Saint movement has worked in his shadow since, with provenance research on any sensational find now assuming a Hofmann until proven otherwise, a discipline the earlier Michigan Relics affair had taught the church in cruder form generations before.

The frame matters, and the atlas states it explicitly: Hofmann's documents are not debated artifacts of Mormon history, they are debunked fabrications, established as such by forensic examination and by his own confessions in the 1987 plea agreement that spared him a capital trial. He pleaded guilty to two counts of second degree murder and to fraud, and remains imprisoned in Utah. Linda Sillitoe and Allen Roberts's Salamander remains the standard account of the case. Nothing he made tells us anything about Joseph Smith's world; what it documents is the market for religious history itself, and how expertly want can be supplied.