A first-edition copy of the Book of Mormon sold for $240,000 Thursday at an auction hosted by Potter & Potter Auctions in Chicago.
Reid Moon — owner and collector of books, documents and artifacts at Moon’s Rare Books in Utah — told the Deseret News the $240,000 sale price is a record, as a first-edition copy of the Book of Mormon “has never sold for more than $200,000 at auction.”
The previous high was set in 2007, when a copy with provenance sold for $180,000.
That copy had belonged to Orson Pratt, a former apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Yet having submitted a final bid of $180,000 — or $216,000 with fees — for the recently sold copy himself, Moon said he was “not really surprised” to see the copy sell for “almost a quarter-million dollars.”
“There’s never a copy just sitting out there on somebody’s website waiting to be sold. I literally have dozens of people on a waiting list waiting for a copy,” he said. “I would not be surprised to see a first-edition copy of the Book of Mormon sell for $1 million in the next 10 years.”
Moon explained it’s long been assumed that roughly 10% of the 5,000 first-edition copies printed in 1830 by E.B. Grandin in Palmyra, New York, had survived. Yet, the fact that he has sold more than 300 copies in the past 25 years leads him to believe the number of surviving copies is closer to 750 to 800, he said.
“The demand has accelerated in the past year,” Moon explained, “with demand far outstripping supply.”
For context, Moon shared that a first-edition copy of the Book of Mormon usually sells for more than a first-edition “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen or a first-edition set of “The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien. These typically sell for roughly $150,000 or $100,000, respectively.
As for a comparison with other first-edition religious texts such as the King James and Gutenberg bibles, price trends for these two texts differ because of availability.
For instance, Moon explained that the price of a first-edition King James Bible has remained “fairly constant” at about $100,000–$150,000, seeing there are always several copies available for sale. In contrast, a first-edition Gutenberg Bible — of which a complete copy has not been sold in almost 50 years — is “excessively rare.” And if sold today, Moon said it would likely sell for $25–50 million.
Having recently visited the Library of Congress — the largest library in the world, located in Washington D.C. — Moon also shared he learned that the most requested book to see there is a first-edition copy of the Book of Mormon.
“And that is out of over 25 million cataloged books,” he added.
From his experience, Moon estimates that more than 90% of purchases for first-edition copies of the Book of Mormon have been made by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The other 10% have been made by institutions and other persons interested in the book’s historical significance.