Palmyra, New York, a young village on the newly built Erie Canal.

A young prophet named Joseph Smith and a young enterprising printer named B. Grendon.

All of this for the bringing forth of an ancient record,

the printing of the Book of Mormon.

Normally, in those days, people only printed a few hundred copies of a book

and to print five thousand was extraordinary.

Coming up next on the Joseph Smith papers.

KJAZZ television in cooperation with the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints presents this weekly series highlighting the research of scholars and historians as they prepare for the publication of The Joseph Smith Papers. And now your host, Glenn Rawson.

With the translation of the Book of Mormon now accomplished and the copyright secured, Joseph set out to have the book printed.

Now, have you ever thought about the immensity of this project? They’re on the western frontier.

Joseph has a 600-page book

and he wants 5,000 copies.

Well, there probably was no man better prepared for the project than young Egbert B. Grandin right there in Palmyra.

Egbert Grandin, the printer; his brother Phillip, and two twin

brothers, Joel and Levi Thayer of Palmyra,

went together and purchased this property from the state of New York.

And then in 1828 had this four-bay block, this three story high brick structure constructed. With the plans for the Erie Canal to pass through this area,

entrepreneurs certainly anticipated that there would be

growth in this village. And right up here on the third floor,

this book goes to press.

And in that roughly six-month period from August until March of 1830, the Book of Mormon is at press.

But here in this little place, in America, this mushrooming village, comes forth this work which has this tremendous responsibility to help carry the plan of salvation to the nations of the earth.

This Book of Mormon.

Egbert Grandin had agreed with Joseph Smith and Martin Harris to print it. It took a little bit of persuading because by then the rumors were out about this “gold bible” and some residents in and around Palmyra were starting to say they'd boycott the book if Grandin printed it. So he didn’t want to. But when Joseph got a printer in Rochester to agree to do it,

then came back and said, “Well, we’re going to do it anyway, Grandin, and you might as well.” Then Grandin was willing to take the money and take the risk on the project. Martin Harris mortgaged his home and part of his farm to pay for the publication of The Book of Mormon.

And it was quite a big project, very ambitious print run for that time and place, really.

John Gilbert set the type.

Milton W. Hamilton in his work The Country Printer

New York State, 1785-1830, put their accomplishment

in perspective when he stated, “Two outstanding publishing events occurred in western New York in the period 1785 to 1830.

The first was the printing of William Morgan’s Revelation of Masonry in the office of David C. Miller in Batavia, 1826.

The second was the publication of The Book of Mormon or

the golden bible of Joseph Smith by E. B. Grandin.” Now, Grandin was ambitious and, more importantly, he was capable. But that's not to say that he didn't have reservations about this project.

Henry Allen, the grandson of E.B. Grandin,

said, “My grandfather at first refused. After consulting friends who felt it was merely a religious matter

and that he would be in no way related to the religion,

he finally consented.”

Pomeroy Tucker said it was a hard sell that E.B. Grandin

and was concerned that there was a fraud afoot

and that he would be defrauding the public as well as his friend, Martin Harris.

Wisdom often comes from hard experiences,

and Joseph had had a few of his own.

The loss of the 116 pages had taught Joseph that another copy of the manuscript should be made before the printing process began.

Now, let’s talk a little bit about the 1830. As I mentioned,

to do the printing of the 1830 edition,

Joseph Smith instructed them to make a copy of the original manuscript.

And Oliver Cowdrey started doing this in August of 1829, and he prepared the first 24 pages, and they took it in.

We did discover, as Oliver would copy, he made about three

textual changes per manuscript page as he copied.

And when I say that, it includes a deletion of an “uh” or an addition of “the.” It includes, you know, the most minor kinds of things, but we include those as changes.

Virtually every one of them are accidental.

There are a few places where he would read the printer's manuscript, and it didn’t make sense and he’d make a correction. And he and the original has the same. It doesn't make sense. So he'd correct both.

He did that, though, probably, I would say at most 10 times.

I mean, that's the whole, you know, very rare. Most of the time, he was just copying

and he's accidentally making errors.

And the first thing they did before Joseph Smith went back to Pennsylvania was to set up the type for the title page.

And when they set up the type, they just actually did the title page alone.

And they ran off some copies, and these are called proof sheets

because they were going to be typos and various things in them.

And we actually have a copy

of the original proof sheet of the title page. And when we actually, . . . if you go through this, you’ll find that there are a number of typos. For instance, “thereof” is spelled “therhof.”

There’s is an H instead of an E. It’s down there. And then “confounded” as “coefounded,” and “house” is “houso.” There’s all these typos. But that’s what happens when the typesetter sets it.

And then they look it over carefully, they find these errors, and then they correct them. And then they start the press run.

Now, in this particular case, they hadn't done the other.

There would have been 15 other pages that they would have done.

And typically when they would print them, this is sort of what it would look like. You would

have 16 pages.

And I guess we could put that there and you could see it. In fact, we’ll put it this way, because there’s the actual corrected title page.

And if you go through here, you’ll notice—in fact, let’s put the other one up right beside it—

and we can see a lot of, sort of, differences.

So, for example, the leading, they’ve increased it,

the spacing between the lines has been increased.

And so it's brought down here further.

But this I think, “Junnior,” you can see “Junnior” has got a double “N” and and they caught that error. and so they corrected it and so forth.

This is called a proof sheet. With a proof sheet you would typically check it against the manuscript to make sure it's as accurate as possible.

And then they would start the press work.

But what was interesting was that first day they just did the title page and they handed out copies of it.

And Stephen Harding was there, and he later donated his copy to the Church. And sometime after that, he was one of the territorial governors for Utah.

And never joined the church, as far as I know.

But he did donate his copy and there's

his signature and so forth, and he gave it and we’re glad to have it because this is then a proof sheet of what took place. So that's the proof sheet.

And we have to distinguish between the proof sheet and then the corrected regular sheets that are coming off. Now after they would start the press work, and they have to actually do—they have to end up with 5,000 copies. And when they would do this, they would actually have a larger, twice as large, and the other eight pages that are on this other side would actually be out here.

So they would do all 16 pages and they go to 2,500 sheets.

Then when they were done,

they would go back and do the other side. They’d turn them around, each sheet, and lay it the other side and print the other side of it.

So you get 2,500 more copies.

Then they would cut it

when they were going to bind it. They would cut these, so you would end up with 5,000 copies.

And this is how they’re able to actually do 5,000 copies in about eight months.

But after they would start the regular press work,

the typesetter would sit down and just go through his copy, not checking against the manuscript, and would look for typos or punctuation errors and things. Would mark them.

And after he had gone through it, he would stop the press.

This is called an “in press change.”

And they would go in then and try, and they

would correct these typos.

And this is called an “in press change.”

Now, if you've done about 10 percent of

the 2,500, you’ve got about 250 sheets already printed.

Do you throw those away? No. This is expensive stuff.

So, what you can find is that in an 1830 edition, such as this one, it turns out you have 37 sheets like this, and they’re all put together and bound.

And some of the sheets have uncorrected states

and some of them have corrected states.

Usually there's about three or four

signatures—there are 37 in here of

these big sheets—and about three or four of them will be in an uncorrected state and all the rest will be corrected. In the middle of a press run, then, the printer would stop and correct the error.

Now, the end result of this would be that for that verse, some copies of the 1830 Book of Mormon would be corrected

and others would contain the original error.

Now, what this means is, I’ve examined 100 copies of the 1830. I didn’t know there was that many out there.

Oh, there’s at least 500 and maybe 700

the estimates have been made. Because it’s the first edition, people have saved them,

and so there’s quite a few.

In any event, I’ve examined 100 or so in public, sort of accessible places so that people can go check my work.

But I have yet to find two copies that are the same.

Because—You mean all the way through?—in press changes, yes.

So you’ll have an in press change in one copy on a certain side of the page and not on the others.

And so, when you end up looking at a given copy, there'll be some pages that have uncorrected states and others that have corrected. Now, a lot of people have accused

the typesetters for the 1830, because they didn't believe the Book of Mormon was the word of God, they thought it was some kind of fraudulent thing that this Joseph Smith farmer boy was foisting on everyone.

But they were always very proud of their work and they did their best that they could do.

There are quite a few typos, and people have complained about those,

but whenever they found typos, they tried to correct them.

In fact, there’s one of these sheets, one of these signatures, they stop the press five times, so there are six states.

But in any event, this shows, too, that these individuals were trying their hardest to produce

an accurate copy of the Book of Mormon.

They did make mistakes; they were a small press.

In fact, normally in those days, people only printed a few hundred copies of a book.

And to print 5,000 was extraordinary.

And that's one of the reasons why many of

the printers weren't really too happy about undertaking such a project because their press would be used for such a long period of time on this kind of thing. One of the interesting things that happened as they were printing the book, they decided to set aside

sheets like this, one for each of

the 37 signatures, that would be in the final copy without binding them.

Dr. Skousen discovered pencil marks on the original manuscript where John Gilbert, the typesetter, had corrected the punctuation.

The problem was they shouldn't have been there. They should have been on the printer’s manuscript.

So how do we explain that?

This was one of the biggest shocks actually of working on this, is to discover that,

you know, Oliver Cowdery and Hiram Smith and Martin Harris took in the original. I guess they weren’t supposed to do this,

but they did do it. It was about three-fourths of the way through. Apparently, they didn't think there was any problem with losing it. I think by then they were always taking it home each night.

The evidence seems to suggest that

I think at about second Nephi in the Isaiah portions, they did let John Gilbert, the typesetter,

take it home and he marked it up with ink.

It was Isaiah portions. But generally speaking, they were taking it home.

So I think they felt secure in doing this.

I discovered this initially when Glenn Rowe showed me a fragment from Second Nephi, 26 and 27, that the Church has.

And here’s this piece of the original—it’s a fragment— it’s got pencil marks on it, and the pencil marks are a sign

that this is what the typesetter had in front of him because there is no punctuation basically in the text originally, and it has to be added by the typesetter.

And so I looked at Glenn, I say, “Where did you get this?

You know, this can’t be part of the printer’s manuscript. It’s intact, you know.”

But by then, I had sort of figured out that it looks like they must have been taking in the original.

The Book of Mormon was famous locally before it was ever printed. People had heard about it and they wanted to know.

Now, some of them were angry and others were merely curious.

At any rate, there was one fellow who found a way to capitalize on this heightened sense of public interest.

During the time it's in press, a fellow named Abner Cole, who sometimes goes by the alias Obadiah Dogberry—yeah,

that’s a good pen name—he pilfers some of the passages of it. He writes a newspaper and prints a newspaper on the weekends in Grandin’s print shop.

So while everybody else is out for the weekend, he’s in there making this newspaper, Palmyra Reflector.

And so he’s looking for copy, steals a couple of pages of the Book of Mormon, and sticks them in his newspaper.

Well, it upsets Joseph, as you might imagine. Joseph asserts his copyright. It almost comes to blows. Abner Cole wants to fight Joseph. So it didn't come to violence, but Cole was stopped.

Joseph stopped him from putting any more passages in.

And so then he would he would satirize it.

The Book of Pukei, he wrote.

And it was kind of a mock version of the Book of Mormon.

There was a boycott by the sectarians in the area,

both here and over in Seneca County, devastating.

A book that sold for $1.75, initially, then went for $1.25.

But, nevertheless, those copies of the Book of Mormon went out, and went up as far as Canada and then to St. Lawrence County and carried into Ohio and elsewhere by our missionaries. And, they were, in effect, like a sleeping time bomb as they were placed

and went off in households such as that of Phineas Young and Brigham Young, Heber C Kimball, and the Murrays, and the Greens, and others. And the church grew and prospered

because people read the word and the book is its own best witness.

That boycott only had local effect,

enough so that Martin Harris was forced to sell part of his farm.

The book, however, was so widely distributed that Palmyra, in 1830, would not be Joseph Smith’s only opportunity to edit and publish the Book of Mormon.

Let's just look here at some of the other editions that were published during Joseph Smith's lifetime. Two of the editions, Joseph Smith was actively involved in them.

Mostly with editing. The first one we have here is the 1837. This is, an edition published

in Kirtland. The Church printed it themselves.

This is unusual for the Church

because usually they were having others do the

the printing of Book of Mormons.

I think it's important that as we try to ascertain what

the prophet Joseph Smith and Oliver Calvary were doing in making adjustments to the text in the Book of Mormon, that we visit a very important little passage in the preface to the second edition of The Book of Mormon,

the 1837 edition,

where they explain what they are doing.

They're not trying to hide the process that they're going through.

They’re trying to illuminate, for the reader, what they’re doing to the text.

“Individuals acquainted with book printing are aware of the numerous typographical errors which always occur in manuscript editions. It is only necessary to say that the whole has been carefully re-examined and compared with the original manuscripts by elder Joseph Smith Jr. , the translator of the Book of Mormon,

assisted by the present printer, brother O. Cowdery,

who formerly wrote the greatest portion of the same

as dictated by Brother Smith.”

Actually, what Joseph Smith did mostly for this edition is remove a lot of the bad grammar. What would be considered non-standard, at least. And even he removed biblical bad grammar. That is, for instance, “Our Father, which art in Heaven.” Today, we would want to— that’s the way the King James Bible reads: “Our Father, which art in Heaven.” But we expect, “Our Father who art in Heaven.”

So for this edition, if you go back to that portion of it, you’ll see, “Our Father who art in Heaven.”

It's interesting you point that out, because I see that dovetailing with his work on the Joseph Smith translation, he made a lot of those same corrections in the JST.

That’s right. In the JST, he was making grammatical corrections, much like what he did for this,

the second edition of the Book of Mormon.

And so this is a very valuable Book of Mormon to show Joseph Smith's editing.

One thing you'll notice here, also in the early editions, including the 1830, the Testimony of the Witnesses, the three witnesses say “Amen” at the end. Only later were the witness statements moved to the front. But in the early editions, they're all at the end.

When Joseph called the Book of Mormon

the most correct of any book on earth,

he wasn't talking about grammar and punctuation.

In 1837, Joseph published the Book of Mormon again

and took that opportunity to correct some of

the errors that had come in due to transcription and printing.

He also modernized some of the English.

Now, it was at this time that he made one of his most famous changes in the Book of Mormon: “And it came to pass.”

So this is the 1837, and it has thousands of grammatical changes. Most part, there are a few which are more stylistic,

but most of them are grammatical changes. Is there any substance to that that Joseph just took out some of the “and it came to passes”?

He did take out about 44, I think, 40-some of them. Oh, so it is true then. He did take some of them out. You know, it's interesting though, those 40-some that he took out were ones that tended to be redundant. And so he would have something like, you know,

“And it came to pass the angel spake to Alma

and it came to pass that Alma turned around and it came to pass that Alma went back to the city.” Or something like that.

And what's interesting about that, though,

is that in the King James Bible, you don't have such repetitions like that.

But in the original Hebrew, you do.

This kind of excessive use. Actually, in the Hebrew, it’s viahi and it means something like “and then.”

And it is used in this excessively redundant way in the Hebrew. Now, the King James translators thought,

we're not going to put all those in there. So they would cut out some of them.

And it's interesting, the original text of the Book of Mormon is like the Hebrew.

It's got excessive use, really excessive use of and it came to pass.

And Joseph Smith edited the text towards what the King James would have. OK, let's look at the next edition.

This is the 1840. It was printed in Cincinnati.

Ebenezer Robinson took an 1837 that they, Joseph and him, had worked through,

and Joseph had made more corrections of various kinds. And he then he took an 1837 with him to Cincinnati to have this company

prepare, print the actual copy. But when they produced this particular Book of Mormon, they produced it from what are called stereotyped plates.

This was a new kind of system. You see, when you normally do type setting, you've got to set all the type.

You don't have enough type to set the whole book.

So you set a certain number of pages. You run off the pages. The proof sheet procedure. Yes. And then when you’re done with the 5,000 copies of the 1830, you break up the type, you distribute it, put it back in the cases,

and then the typesetter starts a new group of pages

because you don’t have enough type to leave it all set up.

So what they came upon was a system where you would set up the type, and for each page then you could create, using a papier mâché process, by pressing it on,

you could get a copy of the whole set page. And keep it.

Well, no, you actually wouldn’t keep the papier mâché. You would immediately take it and pour lead, into a mold to create a whole sheet, not of individual type anymore, but of one whole sheet of the page. And so you'd have a stack of all, you know, all these individual pages, all single lead.

And so this is why . . . this is the way this was done.

So they printed off an impression and probably a couple of thousand copies. And then Robinson took

the plates that have been prepared to Nauvoo.

And then over the next few years, they’d run out of copies, they would print more from these stereotype plates.

So this was the 1840. This one we could check, but it looks like it's an actual one that was released in Cincinnati.

I'd have to check some of the details,

but in any one of the plates, got a little defect in it as they were being transported. So anything printed actually in Nauvoo has this defect in one place. So you can tell, you have to look at it more closely.

When you came to the last impression they were going to use these plates in 1842,

and Joseph Smith redid the title page.

Oh, he did! And everything else in here is the same as this, it’s coming from the stereotype plates, the 1840.

But he redid the title page.

And the one thing which he did was to call it a new edition, which it really wasn't.

It’s an additional impression, but he says it’s 1842.

And interestingly, he decided to just put,

“Translated by Joseph Smith,” not “Jr.” In the 1837, he had “Translated by Joseph Smith, Jr.” His father died, if I recall, in late 1840.

And so, in those days, when you were a junior, you became a senior basically, or you got rid of the junior, when your father died.

So we see him doing this in the 1842.

This is a fairly rare edition

because of this title page being changed.

But later we went back to putting the “Jr.” in.

And the reason we did this was that in the witness statements, it distinguishes between Joseph Smith Jr. and Joseph Smith Sr.

We’ve seen, then, how diligent Joseph Smith and others were in bringing forth The Book of Mormon and in getting it out to all the world. Now, on our next show,

the first biographer in the Church, Lucy Mack Smith.

The history she writes

is a history of her family and also the history of persecution of her family for the gospel’s sake.

That’s next week on The Joseph Smith Papers. I’m Glenn Rawson.

Thanks for joining us.