Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon, [ca. 12 Apr. 1828–ca. 1 July 1829]; handwriting of Oliver Cowdery, John Whitmer, one unidentified scribe, and JS; Emma Smith, Martin Harris, Samuel Smith, Christian Whitmer, and Reuben Hale were reported to have acted as scribes, though their handwriting is not known to be present on the extant portion of the manuscript; originally about 600 pages of text, with a significant number of pages no longer extant (a portion of the original translation lost in summer 1828 and about 72 percent of the remaining text lost through damage and custodial dispersal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries); CHL; Wilford Wood Museum, Bountiful, Utah; Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City; and private possession of multiple individuals. Includes compositor’s marks and redactions.

JS stated that he translated the Book of Mormon “by the gift and power of God” from plates “found in the township of Manchester, Ontario county, New-York.” The first portion of the Book of Mormon manuscript was lost in summer 1828. Of the text that was dictated thereafter, only about 28 percent remains. Because of the deterioration and scattering of the manuscript, some aspects of its original physical state are difficult or impossible to determine. General statements herein about the manuscript are based upon the surviving leaves and fragments.

Following the loss of the first portion of the manuscript in summer 1828, JS dictated approximately 488 pages of additional text. Of these 488 pages, some portion of 232 of them survives, ranging from nearly complete leaves to fragments of leaves, some very small. The other 256 pages have been lost entirely. Like the Bible, the Book of Mormon text is divided into smaller books, and seven of the fifteen books that make up the text of the Book of Mormon—Jarom, Omni, the Words of Mormon, Mosiah, 4 Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni—are entirely nonextant in what remains of the original manuscript. Before they were damaged, the pages were described as being common foolscap size, or approximately 16–18 × 12–13½ inches (41–46 × 30–34 cm), which matches the size of surviving leaves.

Five different types of paper have been identified in the extant Book of Mormon manuscript. Patterns of wire marks from the papermaking process and surface textures of each type of paper are distinct, suggesting that the papers were manufactured at different mills or at different times. The most frequently used paper type is found in the portion of the manuscript containing what is now Alma 10:31 through 3 Nephi 27:7; the next most frequently used paper type was used for 1 Nephi 14:11 through Jacob 4:14. The other three paper types are found in 1 Nephi 2:2–13:35, Jacob 5:46–Enos 1:14, and Ether 3:9–15:17. It is possible that other paper types were used but have not survived. Portions of the surviving manuscript were ruled by hand; scribes then folded multiple sheets in half to create gatherings on which they inscribed the text. The fragmentary nature of the surviving manuscript makes it impossible to determine whether the entire manuscript was organized into gatherings, but the extant pieces show that gatherings were in use at least by the time Alma 22:22 was dictated. The exact number of gatherings is unknown, in part because surviving gatherings show that the number of pages per gathering varied. For instance, one gathering in the book of Alma contains ninety-six pages, while the next gathering has only twenty-eight pages. The extant sheets of the Book of Mormon manuscript were folded either widthwise or lengthwise, creating gatherings of about 16½ × 7 inches (42 × 18 cm) or 13 × 8¼ inches (33 × 21 cm), depending on the orientation of the paper.

Once the gatherings were hand ruled and folded, scribes typically wrote fifty-three to fifty-four lines of text if the gathering was folded lengthwise and thirty-five to thirty-nine lines if the gathering was folded widthwise. From the surviving leaves, it appears that the text was inscribed before the gatherings were sewn together with yarn or ribbon. Many of the surviving leaves bear a heading written at the top of the page by Oliver Cowdery or an unknown scribe (hereafter referred to as scribe 3) that summarizes the contents of that page. The extant headings appear to have been created by scribes after the text of the page was written. As the translation neared completion, the scribes appear to have stopped adding headings to the pages. None of these headings were copied onto the second copy of the manuscript given to the printer for use in publishing the book. Compositor’s marks from the typesetting process are found on several fragments of the original manuscript, from Helaman 13 through 3 Nephi 27, indicating that the original manuscript was occasionally used by the typesetter. Whether the original manuscript had a title page or copyright page, as the printer’s manuscript has, is unknown. Evidence suggests that the original manuscript contained the statements of the Three and Eight Witnesses who were shown the plates, since those statements were copied at the end of the final gathering of the printer’s manuscript by Oliver Cowdery.

While the original manuscript did not fully survive, several sources describe the document before it sustained damage in the mid-nineteenth century. Church member Ebenezer Robinson recalled the general appearance of the manuscript when he saw it in 1841: “It was written on foolscap paper, and formed a package, as the sheets lay flat, of about two or two and a half inches thick, I should judge. It was written mostly in Oliver Cowdery’s handwriting. . . . Some parts of it were written in other handwriting.” Another church member, Warren Foote, similarly recalled that “it was the size of common foolscap paper and about three inches thick.” When church member Franklin D. Richards saw the manuscript decades later, after it had suffered significant water damage, he described it as being “upon the foolscap of half a century since, apparently without lines. The paper is yellow with age and from the moisture sweated from its own hiding place. It is brittle to the touch. Many of the leaves crumble like ashes and some of them are broken away. It is necessary to handle them with the utmost care. The writing is faint, and is not legible on many continuous lines, but fragmentary clauses, and even whole verses are occasionally discernible.”

In the 1880s, Latter-day Saints began acquiring portions of the damaged manuscript. Some individuals who are known to have owned fragments include Sarah Granger Kimball, who acquired ten leaves in 1883; Joseph W. Summerhays, who acquired a leaf in 1884; Franklin D. Richards, who acquired portions of sixty-nine leaves in 1885; Andrew Jenson, who acquired parts of eight leaves in 1888; and Wilford Wood, who in 1937 acquired numerous fragments of twenty-nine leaves. Some of the individuals who acquired portions of the manuscript donated them to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or gave them to various friends or family members, while others retained possession of the pages. Roughly 28 percent of the text of the Book of Mormon is extant in the surviving pages and fragments of the original manuscript. The Church History Library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints holds approximately 90 percent of what survives; the Wilford Wood Museum in Bountiful, Utah, and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City also hold fragments, and some fragments are still in private possession. It is possible that other fragments survive but are not currently known to scholars.

Custodians of the document recognized its value, both as a historical artifact and as a symbol of their faith. Several pages were reproduced in late nineteenth-century church publications, the first as early as 1887. Photographs of several of the manuscript pages were created in 1938, apparently for use in proselytizing. In 1948, Ernst Koehler, working for the Genealogical Society of Utah, photographed all the pages then held by the Historian’s Office (later Church History Department) of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Koehler photographed the pages in ultraviolet light, which rendered legible some parts of the text that were previously unreadable. While Koehler’s efforts helped minimize the handling of the manuscript, the pages continued to deteriorate.

The fragile state of the manuscript by the mid-twentieth century led administrators in the Historian’s Office to take steps to preserve the portions in their possession. This preservation effort involved both photographing the manuscript in order to minimize handling and also conserving the manuscript in order to slow the process of decay. In the 1960s, staff of the Historian’s Office hired the W. J. Barrow Restoration Shop in Richmond, Virginia, to conserve the manuscript. A newspaper report announcing the conservation effort stated that the manuscript leaves were “crumbling almost to the point of turning into dust” and that they could “hardly be touched without further crumbling” as they had become “so dried and brittle.” The article continued: “The first step in preservation . . . was to remove the acid from the paper. . . . Next, the sheets were placed between two thin sheets of cellulose acetate and two transparent sheets of tissue paper.” Finally, the leaves were “heated to 400 degrees under pressure to seal the page in the two sheets.” Before the leaves were sent to Virginia, a number of isolated fragments were reattached to the leaves to which they belonged. These more complete leaves were photographed, thereby preserving the state of the manuscript just before the lamination work. Archivists continued trying to identify loose fragments of the manuscript in the years that followed. A significant number of previously unidentified fragments were identified and numbered by Church Historical Department archivist Christy L. Best during the late 1970s. Royal Skousen later built on this work and identified additional fragments.

Though in the 1960s the lamination performed by the W. J. Barrow Restoration Shop conformed to best practices, conservators later learned that the acid in the cellulose acetate used in lamination would eventually seep into the documents, damaging both the paper and the ink. Leaders of the Family and Church History Department therefore decided in 2004 to reverse the lamination. The manuscript was taken to a conservation lab in Massachusetts, where the lamination was removed, thin Japanese paper was applied to the leaves in order to stabilize them, and the leaves were then flattened and enclosed in Mylar. In the 1990s, the fragments held by the Wood family were conserved by Brigham Young University conservators in connection with Royal Skousen’s Book of Mormon Critical Text Project.

For more information on the photographs that appear in this volume, see Note on Photographic Facsimiles.

Note: The transcript of the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon on this website includes only the original inscriptions, not the later redactions made to the manuscript to prepare the text for publication. Readers will notice discrepancies between the images and the transcript. For a transcript that includes the redactions, consult the facsimile images available by clicking on the book icon to the left of the images; see also Revelations and Translations, Volume 5: Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon, facsimile ed. (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2021).

Text that is missing from the manuscript because a portion of the page is nonextant, torn, worn, or otherwise damaged is supplied in brackets and printed over a light gray background. The conjectured text printed on the gray background comes from Skousen, Original Manuscript.

Note: Several leaves from the original manuscript are owned by the Wilford Wood Museum. The Wilford Wood Museum has given written permission to the Joseph Smith Papers Project to publish images of these leaves on this website. No further publication is authorized, and publication by the Joseph Smith Papers Project does not place these images in the public domain. These images are marked with an identifying watermark. To inquire about high-resolutions images of Wilford Wood Museum–owned images for scholarly use, please contact the Wilford Wood Museum, Bountiful, Utah.