All texts and phone calls went unanswered. When I arrived during the confirmed pick up time, the office was closed. I followed the instructions of informing the office that I would like to pick up my mail 24 hours before arrival. Plans are also underway to post images of the entire manuscript to, an online repository of historical papers written by Joseph Smith and his early followers.The office is not honoring the terms of service. Within the next few months, the document will be displayed at the Church History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. “We feel sad, too … When a decision had to be made, we chose the well-being of people and preserving the current and future mission of the church over owning this document.”Ĭommunity of Christ members may take some comfort in knowing that the LDS Church intends to make the manuscript accessible to all those who wish to see it. “Church leaders know that letting go of this document will cause some members sadness and grief,” the church said in its statement.
The decision to part with the manuscript was a difficult one of the Community of Christ. Snow, LDS Church Historian and Recorder, said in a statement. “The printer’s manuscript is the earliest surviving copy of about 72 percent of the Book of Mormon text, as only about 28 percent of the earlier dictation copy survived decades of storage in a cornerstone in Nauvoo, Illinois,” Steven E. Joseph Smith is said to have placed the original copy of his dictation in the cornerstone of a house in Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1841, but that document sustained considerable damage over time. The manuscript is particularly significant because it is largely intact, missing just three lines of text. Cowdery later passed the manuscript on to one David Whitmer, and Whitmer’s grandson sold it to the Community of Christ in 1903.
Grandin, who used it to set the type for the first printed edition of the Book of Mormon. In 1830, Smith gave the document to the New York-based printer E.B. It was reportedly hand-written by Oliver Cowdery, one of Mormonism’s early adherents.
Walch of Deseret News reports that the manuscript is a copy of the original text dictated by Joseph Smith. Donors provided the funds required to purchase the manuscript. The church acquired the document from the Community of Christ, a denomination connected to the Latter Day Saints (LDS) movement. Still, as Reid Moon, owner of Moon's Rare Books in Provo, Utah, tells him, "for actual dollars paid, this does set a record.") (According to Tad Walch of Deseret News, a publication owned by the LDS Church, the $30.8 million paid by Gates would be worth $49 million today. The Community of Christ has claimed that the document’s $35 million price tag marks the largest sum ever paid for a manuscript, surpassing the $30.8 million paid by Bill Gates for the Codex Leicester, a collection of Leonardo da Vinci’s scientific writings, in 1994.Īntiquarian bookseller Mark James confirmed to Alison Flood of the Guardianthat the sale was likely record-breaking, but noted it did not take into account inflation. As Carol Kuruvilla reports for the Huffington Post, the Church purchased a printer’s manuscript of the Book of Mormon for $35 million. With God’s help, he translated the inscriptions, producing a sacred text known as the Book of Mormon.Įarlier this week, the Mormon Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints doled out a hefty sum for an early, hand-written copy of the religion’s foundational text. In 1827, according to Mormon belief, a young man named Joseph Smith discovered golden plates engraved with ancient Egyptian writing on a hill in upstate New York.
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