The Joseph Smith Papers - Publishing

Publishing

In February 2008, The Church Historian’s Press, an imprint of the Church History Department of the LDS Church, was established "for publishing works related to the Church’s origin and growth." The publication of The Joseph Smith Papers is the press's initial project.

Marlin K. Jensen, Church Historian and Recorder at the time of the announcement, said the project will include “journals, diaries, correspondence, articles and notices. Everything of a written nature Joseph Smith generated, or over which he had oversight.” High resolution images of many of the original documents were published by Brigham Young University Press in 2002 as part of Selected Collections from the Archives of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The two volume set contains 76 DVDs of images from 1830 to 1923, including complete images of the Joseph Smith Collection, circa 1831-1844, the Revelations Collections, circa 1831-1876, architectural drawings of the Nauvoo Temple, and several volumes containing minutes from meetings Joseph Smith attended or oversaw. Annotated transcriptions of the Joseph Smith related document from this DVD collection, in addition to the number of Joseph Smith documents housed in widespread repositories and in private collections will make the documents far more accessible to scholars of American religious history, historians, researchers, and the public.

Before publication, transcripts of the manuscripts are verified three times, and annotation is supplied to illuminate the historical context of each document..” To assure quality, all citations and footnotes are verified, often double-checked, by production editors and carefully copy edited. The manuscripts are also examined by editors over the project, and drafts of volumes are reviewed by external scholarly reviewers and General Authorities of the LDS Church.

The first volume of The Joseph Smith Papers, entitled, The Joseph Smith Papers, Journals, Volume 1: 1832–1839, was released in December 2008. Despite the $50 retail price, unexpectedly high demand caused the initial printing of 12,500 copies to sell out in two weeks, and the publishers to triple their projected second printing order to 16,500. Many Christmas purchasers bought gift certificates for the coming printing and some extant copies were resold for over twice the retail price.

As of October 10, 2009 over 48,000 copies of volume 1 were sold. The second volume of the The Joseph Smith Papers, entitled The Joseph Smith Papers: Revelations and Translations, Volume 1: Manuscript Revelation Books was available for purchase September 23, 2009. The original sales projection for this volume was 3,000 copies. Within two weeks, over 6,100 copies were sold in Deseret Book retail stores and over 11,000 copies were requested by other bookstores.