The Book of Mormon Goes on Sale in Palmyra

On March 26, 1830, the first bound copies of the Book of Mormon went on sale at the Palmyra Bookstore, run out of E. B. Grandin's print shop on Main Street. Grandin had turned Joseph Smith down at first, uneasy about the book and the money, before agreeing to print 5,000 copies under a $3,000 security arranged with the help of Martin Harris, a Palmyra farmer who mortgaged his own land to guarantee the job. Compositor John H. Gilbert set the type from Smith's dictated manuscript, which arrived with no punctuation, and the shop's presses ran for the better part of eight months to finish the run. Palmyra sits in the heart of what people later called the burned-over district, a stretch of upstate New York scorched repeatedly by religious revival, and this small-town press run helped light the next fire: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.