This article describes where you can access images online of early English editions of the Book of Mormon.

Images from Early Editions

Images from early editions of the Book of Mormon and the printer’s manuscript can be found on the Joseph Smith Papers website and in the Church History Catalog:

• Printer’s manuscript, digitized for 2015 Joseph Smith Papers
• Printer’s manuscript, 1923 photostatic copies
• 1830 edition
• 1837 edition
• 1840 edition
• 1841 edition
• 1849 edition

Timeline

The Church website offers a timeline showing the emergence of these and other editions.

Original Manuscript

Images of the original manuscript will appear on the Joseph Smith Papers website sometime in 2022 or 2023 and will be published as Revelations and Translations, Volume 5: The Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon.

Research

Church scholars continue to exhaustively research the differences between Book of Mormon manuscripts. You can see their work at the Joseph Smith Papers Project and the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project. These sites offer access to various editions of the Book of Mormon as well as analysis of the text changes that occurred between editions.

The Church History Library houses over 700 unique English copies of the Book of Mormon. To search for these copies of the Book of Mormon, you can search for call number M222.1 B724 in the Church History Catalog. You can use the filters on the left side of the page to narrow your search by publication year, genre, subject, and format.

This information was summarized from the article “Ask Us: Top Five Reference Questions about Book of Mormon Publishing.”