Saturday, December 7, 2019

Don Bradley on Joseph Smith Seeking Copyright for the 1830 Book of Mormon


In The 1830 Book of Mormon listing Joseph Smith as “Author and Proprietor” I respond to Kieron Wood, a Catholic critic, who tried (lamely) to argue that the 1830 copyright calling Joseph "Author and Proprietor" as evidence that Joseph initially presented the Book of Mormon as his own creation and not a translation of an ancient text.

In his book on the lost portion of the Book of Mormon (the so-called 116 pages [“so-called” was there were more than 116 pages [as proven in his book]), Don Bradley presented some interesting background to understanding Joseph Smith seeking out a copyright for the 1830 Book of Mormon:

In addition to replacing the lost manuscript with another text, Joseph took another step that appears to have been aimed at foiling the conspirators described in Doctrine and Covenants 10. Early in June 1829, when Joseph had finished translating Mormon's abridgment, he dispatched one of those assisting him to go to Utica to secure a copyright for the book. There are four oddities in how this was done. First, acquiring a copyright for a book was not usually considered necessary at the time and not usually done. Second, the book was not yet complete. Third, Joseph's assistant, presumably at his behest, insisted that not just the book's title as required by law, but its entire title page, be transcribed into the copyright application. Fourth, the copyright, thus acquired, technically did not cover Nephi's small plates! The title page transcribed into the copyright record explicitly identified Mormon's record as the work to be copyrighted--making no mention of Nephi's text--and the small plates text mostly had not been translated. What the copyright specifically protected was the translation of Mormon's abridgment. Since the lost manuscript was, Joseph tells us, part of Mormon's abridgment, the lost manuscript would have been protected by the copyright Joseph obtained. It thus appears that Joseph's decision to pursue a copyright for the Book of Mormon text was aimed at stopping the conspirators from publishing the stolen manuscript. (Don Bradley, The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories [Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2019], 64 n. 25)