THE BOOK OF MORMON: An Account Written by the Hand of Mormon, upon Plates taken from the Plates of Nephi. . . . Translated by Joseph Smith, Jun. Second European Edition. Liverpool: Published by Orson Pratt, 15, Wilton St, 1849.

14 cm. (binding, 14.7 cm. = 5¾ inches tall). 2 leaves; [v]-xii, 563, [1 (imprint)] pages. Collated COMPLETE.

SOLD on eBay (Item number: 7028861974), May 15, 2006:  $9,100.00

Flake 600; Crawley 415. The first printing of the Book of Mormon following the death of Joseph Smith. With minor editorial changes by Orson Pratt, and differing from the present text in two important verses (see further below). The main body of the Latter-day Saints was now struggling to survive in Utah, and had no means to publish the book there: no edition would be printed in Utah until 1871.

Five thousand copies were printed, advertised in the Millennial Star ready for sale on May 15, 1849. "Reprinting the 1841 edition," explains Peter Crawley,

Orson Pratt added a half title, included the testimonies of the three and eight witnesses on one page, and moved the index—now headed Contents—to the front of the book. He also made a number of minor textual changes and corrected the punctuation of the text on the title page. [Crawley, p. II:79. IMAGE SHOWN HERE: 1849 portrait of Orson Pratt, engraved by Frederick Piercy, 1849, as found in Pratt's Series of Pamphlets (not published in the Book of Mormon)]

While this was the first Book of Mormon edition to be edited by Orson Pratt (who would be noted for creating the Book's modern chapter and verse system thirty years later), this was also the final Book of Mormon edition to be printed before Franklin D. Richards' addition of paragraph numbers (1852), which began the system in a simple way.

 

CONDITION  —  CONDITION  —  CONDITION

If, in real estate, the over-ruling factor is "location, location, location," so, in the collecting of published books, the rule (other things being equal) is certainly condition. This book offers a nearly fine text block, in its original leather binding in quite nice shape. To be more explicit, this is the sort of condition which some sellers, whom I have observed, would be describing as "mint!!!" (sic- that is not a legitimate book term) or with even more extreme expressions. Hardly any book is in totally perfect condition - certainly not Books of Mormon from the mid nineteenth century - but this is a very desirable example for which no collector ever need apologize. I will mention the minor faults, below, only to be as careful as possible . . .

BINDING: Original black blind-stamped sheep. Both front and back boards with concentric circles enclosed by a square with inset rounded corners, the whole within multiple square borders. The spine with simple gilt lettering and with blind-stamped panel decoration. This is one of four patterns for this edition's binding described by Dr. Crawley (p. II:80). Of those four, the least common was in black or brown morocco (goatskin) with heavy gilt decoration. A very nice copy in that most desirable binding (not the sheep binding offered here) brought $11,311.00 on eBay (Item 3756682828) on October 28, 2004.

Plain pastedown endpapers, including their free endpapers (i.e., one "flyleaf," front and back). REPAIR: The only repair is minor undergirding of the upper spine cap, retaining the original leather. See enlarged spine illustration further below. Lower front joint just barely starting to split at the bottom, and scarcely noticeable. The sewing and binding are very strong.

Preserved in a custom-made, leather backed archival folding box, shown in the illustration above.

TEXT: It would be tempting to describe the pages as nearly perfect. Light soiling to outermost leaves. The interior is uniformly clean and pleasant throughout, with only minor stains in a few margins. The illustrations below are typical of most of the book. There are no tears worth mentioning, and there is no writing on any page. A few pages have small creased areas where an area may have been folded back.

The printing on page 281 occurs so high on the page that the upper ¼ of the page number (the numerals only) was cropped in the binding process. A small round stain of medium darkness occurs in the bottom margins of pp. 537-48, without touching the text. I believe most collectors and book specialists would agree that these are very minor concerns.

The paste-downs (inside covers) have the expected darkening around their perimeters, which has transferred somewhat to the facing blank endpapers, and to a small degree, to the half-title leaf. From the final free endpaper (blank "flyleaf") at the end of the book, someone has cut away the top ¾ of an inch (very evenly, undoubtedly to remove an early former owner's name).

INTERESTING TEXTUAL DIFFERENCES FROM MODERN BOOKS OF MORMON

"Inexplicably," writes Dr. Peter Crawley, Orson Pratt ". . . did not incorporate many of the changes made by Joseph Smith in the 1840 Nauvoo edition, including those in what are now 1 Nephi 20:1 and 2 Nephi 30:6 . . ." (Crawley, p. II:79-80). This meant that the famous "white and delightsome" phrase would be perpetuated in the Utah Church until 1981, for example, and that another phrase, which one of the Church's best Book of Mormon textual scholars recommends removing from the Book of Mormon - is still in the book to the present day . . .

WHITE AND DELIGHTSOME :

". . . in spite of the fact that this phrase is changed in the 1840 edition to pure and a delightsome people . . .  The later LDS editions descended from the 1841 Liverpool Book of Mormon, which was reprinted from the Kirtland edition; so, for example, . . . the change in 2 Nephi 30:6 was not incorporated until 1981." (Crawley p. I:132, describing the 1841 edition). It was one thing for the 1841 British edition, prepared far from Nauvoo, to miss Joseph Smith's 1840 corrections. For Orson Pratt to have to have disregarded such an important textual change in this 1849 edition, on the other hand, and to pass the older "white and delightsome" wording down to us, was a more dramatic oversight or conscious choice.

OUT OF THE WATERS OF BAPTISM :

A less famous, but potentially more dramatic variant appears in what is now 1 Nephi 20:1, in a phrase which Joseph Smith evidently added to the 1840 edition, intended only as an explanation in parentheses. It does not appear in this 1849 edition; see the fourth line from the bottom of its page 46, illustrated here:

The same portion reads in modern LDS editions thus:

. . . and are come forth out of the waters of Judah, or out of the waters of baptism, who swear by the name of the Lord, . . .  (1 Nephi 20:1, emphasis added)

    The LDS text . . . did not adopt this extra phrase until the 1920 edition, but in that edition the parentheses were replaced by commas. . . . This change can mislead the reader into thinking that this parenthetical comment was actually part of the original text, even perhaps concluding not only that this extra phrase is the original biblical text, but also that some scribe deliberately edited it out of the Hebrew text because of its reference to baptism, assumed to be a strictly Christian practice. Joseph Smith's probable intention was to provide an interpretative reading. There is no evidence to suggest in any way that he was restoring the original text of the Book of Mormon, especially since the original manuscript is here extant and it agrees with the reading of the King James Bible (which follows the traditional Hebrew text) and is also in agreement with all other ancient versions of the text insofar as they all lack this extra phrase mentioning baptism. [Royal Skousen. Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon. . . . Part One (Provo, Utah: The Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, Brigham Young University, 2004), p. 427]

Dr. Skousen then shows how Hugh Nibley ran with this issue in rather an unfortunate, "provocative" direction. Skousen concludes very pointedly against Nibley's assertive remarks (in Nibley, Since Cumorah [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1967], p. 151), and states: "One wonders about the scholarship in this passage [by Nibley] since all its details are wrong." Skousen then recommends that the critical text of the Book of Mormon ". . . will, of course, remove this secondary phrase from the text proper and relegate it to the apparatus." (Skousen, p. 428)

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