Thursday, Apr 14, 2022

EVENING WITH AN AUTHOR

 

 

We are excited to announce that Richard Saunders will be here Thursday, April 14 to speak about The 1920 Edition of the Book of Mormon: A Centennial Adventure in Latter-day Saint Book History (published by Greg Kofford Books). He will be here from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., will speak at 6:00, and answer questions and sign books before and after that time. We hope you will be able to make it that night but, if not, we can mail a signed copy or hold one here at the store for pick-up.  To RSVP on Facebook, click here.

While mask mandates have been lifted, we encourage you to use your own judgment. If you have not been vaccinated, please wear a mask as this is a fairly small space. As always, we will record the event and post to YouTube.

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints tend to see the Book of Mormon through the lens of personal use, as a single textual and scriptural monolith—the Book of Mormon. That is somewhat natural, since we tend to have at hand and in-use, only the copy or version in our language needed to study it for inspiration. In the process, the point tends to get overlooked that while we may accept the text as inspired, the physical embodiment of that text—the Book of Mormon—is a mortal reality. The Book of Mormon, while it has a “spirit,” also has a mortal “body” (or rather, bodies) existing in space and time. As such, it has a history—and because it comes to us in the form of a book, it also has a book history.

This study is divided into three parts. The first part is a straightforward history of the edition’s editing, production, and manufacturing processes. It examines key points in the reprint history of the book, following important factors in the subsequent impressions of the work across nearly thirty years of re-impressions, corrections, transfers, and one new format. The narrative crowded into chapters one through four together leave Part II to catalogue the bibliographic minutia that is the beating heart of analytic book history and which provides entertainment for true-blooded bibliophiles. The details contained in the production and manufacturing contracts and coupled to the typographical evidence explained in Part III, together resolve once and for all the question of what constitutes the 1920 edition and what does not.

1920 Edition of the Book of Mormon: A Centennial Adventure in Latter-day Saint Book History. Greg Kofford Books. Hardback. 279pp. $79.95

Dr. Richard L. Saunders, social historian, academic librarian, and former Dean of Library Services at Southern Utah University, has been a student of print culture and book history for over two decades. Informed by activity as an amateur handset printer and craft bookbinder, his scope of interest includes papermaking, typography, printing, and both historical and descriptive bibliography. Dr. Saunders worked professionally on the production side of commercial publishing in the 1990s during the industry’s transition from filmsetting to direct-to-plate technology. His professional output includes Printing in Deseret: Mormons, Politics, Economics, and Utah’s Incunabula, 1849–1851 (Univ. of Utah Press, 2000), Dale Morgan on the Mormons: Collected Works, 2 vols. (Arthur H. Clark, 2012–13); and Reams in the Desert: Papermaking in Utah, 1849–1893 (Legacy Press, 2021).

Also by Richard Saunders
 

Printing in Deseret: Mormons, Politics, Economics, and Utah’s Incunabula, 1849–1851. University of Utah Press, 2000. Hardback. Reg. $35, SALE $9.99

Reams in the Desert: Papermaking in Utah, 1849–1893. Legacy Press, 2021. Paperback. $25.00

Shipping: $6.00 for the first book—inquire for rates on multiple book orders

Priority/FedEx/UPS options available–inquire for details.

Utah residents–add 7.45% sales tax