Is There a “First Printed” Copy of the Book of Mormon First Edition?
This brings us to the question as to whether the uncut pages which Wilford Wood used for his reprint really are “the first printed uncut sheets of the First Edition of the Book of Mormon,”9 meaning the first copies to come from the press. A Deseret News article in the 4 February 1895 issue also describes the “first Mormon bible ever printed” in the form of uncut pages in the hands of Pliny T. Sexton.10 If McKerrow’s hypothesis applies to the 1830 Book of Mormon, it seems unlikely that there is a “first printed” copy of the book. If Wood’s uncut pages are the first printed copy, they ought to contain all the errors and none of the corrections, except in the case of drop-outs where the reverse would be true. His uncut pages, however, contain only 10 of the 41 errors. It may well be the first collated or gathered copy, but it seems unlikely that there was a first printed copy in this special sense. McKerrow’s hypothesis certainly seems to be the case with the 1830 Book of Mormon. There is
