‘It is a miracle’: 200 million printed copies of the Book of Mormon
The first pages of the Book of Mormon began rolling off a Smith Patented Improved Press in 1829, and Joseph Smith secured a copyright for it in June 1829, but there’s a good reason it’s considered to have been published in 1830.
It took nine months to publish the first 5,000 copies on the tiny, hand-lever press. After all, the lever was pressed down once for every eight pages, and the total order included about 3 million pages.
A Palmyra, New York, newspaper ran an ad on March 19, 1830, that said, “We are requested to announce that the ‘Book of Mormon’ will be ready for sale in the course of a week.” Another ad a week later confirmed it indeed was for sale.
Now, last week, we learned that the 200 millionth copy of the Book of Mormon was printed last summer.
If you’ve seen “The Two Best Years,” you know there’s long been a grammar argument over whether that is a lot of Books of Mormon or Book of Mormons. It’s safest to use the phrase copies of the Book of Mormon.
The staying power of printed copies of the Book of Mormon is noteworthy in the age of digitization. After all, it’s freely available on churchofjesuschrist.org, the Book of Mormon app and the Gospel Library app. There’s also the recently revised, illustrated Book of Mormon Stories, not to mention the new Book of Mormon Videos.
“The Bible alone excepted, the Book of Mormon is by far the most widely printed and circulated book in the history of the Western Hemisphere,” the scholar Terryl Givens wrote in his 2009 Oxford Press book, “The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction.”
At 200 million copies, the Book of Mormon appears to trail only the Bible, the Qur’an, “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung,” “Don Quixote” and “A Tale of Two Cities.” It is in the same ballpark now as “The Little Prince,” according to Wikipedia. (No single authoritative source is compiling this information, especially since some of these books and religious texts have been published across centuries where no figures are available.)
The Book of Mormon has received increasing international and scholarly attention over the past 20 years, with books about it published by Oxford, Princeton and Random House presses. The Doubleday Religion Division published a secular printing of the Book of Mormon with the church’s permission in 2004 to get it into bookstores and more libraries worldwide.
The scholar David Bokovoy said, “You don’t have to believe in its historic claims to appreciate it as literature.”
Latter-day Saints will study the Book of Mormon during classes on Sundays this year, and the Church News has published a raft of stories about it that are worth your attention. For example, you won’t want to miss Elder Dale G. Renlund’s appearance on the Church News podcast, where he talks about the 200 millionth copy.
“We know that Joseph saw the gospel rolling forth and covering the earth,” he said, “but this is just a miracle. It is a miracle that it got published in the first place. It is a miracle that it came forth. It is a miracle that it was accepted by so many.”
Here’s a short list of some of what the Church News has published about the Book of Mormon in the past few weeks:
A chart that shows the growth over time in the number of languages with translations of the Book of Mormon.
A piece from BYU’s dean of religious education on promises made by modern prophets about the Book of Mormon’s power to improve lives.
How to digitally share the Book of Mormon with others.
15 teachings, testimonies and promises about the Book of Mormon from church leaders.
How to see historic images of the original manuscript.
Church News executive editor Sarah Jane Weaver wrote, “What I learned from President Nelson about accepting prophetic invitations and the Book of Mormon.”
