Printer's Manuscript of the Book of Mormon

When the Book of Mormon was ready for printing in 1829, Joseph Smith's associates faced a practical problem. Sending the only manuscript into a printing shop meant it would be handled by compositors, spread across cases, and out of their control for months. Their solution was to make a second copy.

Oliver Cowdery, with two other scribes, wrote out the whole text between August 1829 and early 1830, and Egbert B. Grandin's shop at Palmyra, New York, set the first edition from that copy. The precaution turned out to be justified in a way nobody anticipated. The original dictation manuscript was placed in the cornerstone of the Nauvoo House in 1841, and when it was recovered in 1882 water had got in; only about twenty-eight per cent of it survives. The printer's manuscript is complete apart from a single leaf, and it is therefore the only substantially complete manuscript of the Book of Mormon in existence.

It has one further value that a printed edition cannot supply. The manuscript is almost entirely unpunctuated. Every full stop, comma and paragraph break in the 1830 edition was put there by the compositor, John Gilbert, working from an unpunctuated text. Anyone asking how the Book of Mormon is meant to be read is, at that level, reading a typesetter's decisions.

For over a century the manuscript belonged to the smaller of the two main churches that trace themselves to Joseph Smith. It passed from Oliver Cowdery through David Whitmer's family to the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, now the Community of Christ, which held it from 1903. In September 2017 the Community of Christ sold it to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for thirty-five million dollars, among the highest prices ever paid for any manuscript.

The sale drew attention for the figure and for what it said about the two churches, one holding an object of immense significance and needing the funds, the other able to pay. It said rather less about access, which is the point usually missed. The Community of Christ had already permitted the manuscript to be photographed, transcribed and published in full, first through Royal Skousen's critical text project and then in the Joseph Smith Papers, so by 2017 the text was open to anyone.

What changed hands was custody of a physical object and the standing that goes with holding it. What a scholar can read did not change at all. That is worth recording, because the price invites the assumption that something was closed off, and nothing was.