A very rare and historic book in Cody’s Mural Church

Last week, I used my on-the-beat reporter angle to ask for a closer look at one of Cody’s lesser-known treasures, the Cody Mural Museum. I expected only a short visit but instead was given a private viewing, the kind where they open the case, hand you the conservation gloves and let you touch a piece of history. I didn’t expect to find myself standing over one of the rarest early American religious texts still in existence: an original 1830 first-edition Book of Mormon.

Out of the 5,000 copies printed in Palmyra, New York, in 1830, only about 500 survive. Seeing one up close and not in a university archive but in Cody was astonishing. Modern copies are mass-produced by the tens of millions, but this volume was handmade: set one letter at a time on a wooden press and bound before Andrew Jackson completed his first year in office. The uneven type, slight variations in ink and worn boards felt like stepping directly into the 19th century.

The book was produced in Egbert B. Grandin’s small Palmyra print shop beginning in August 1829. Every word was set manually. Typesetter John H. Gilbert later said the manuscript arrived without punctuation or paragraph breaks, so he added all of it as he worked, building each line backward so it would print correctly. Printing 5,000 copies on a frontier press was ambitious. Sheets were inked by hand, pressed one at a time, lifted to dry, folded, trimmed, sewn and then bound. Most first editions weren’t full leather; the standard was paper-covered boards with a leather spine, sturdy and functional rather than decorative.

Because everything was done by hand, no two surviving copies are exactly alike. Early sheets show swapped letters, break lines and small irregularities. Printers corrected mistakes as they went, so early and late printings differ subtly. These quirks aren’t flaws; they are the fingerprints of the people who created the book nearly two centuries ago.

After my visit, I tried to trace how this particular copy traveled from Palmyra to Cody. The last part of its journey is almost as interesting itself. In 1956, “Bud” Webster of Webster Motors in Cody heard that an old Book of Mormon was for sale in Utah. He sent an employee to buy it and paid “a few thousand dollars” for what he believed was simply “a really old Book of Mormon.” He immediately donated it to the Cody 1st Ward, where it sat quietly in a glass case for decades. People knew it was old, but its true significance didn’t come to light until a major renovation in 2015, when historians revealed that it wasn’t just an old book, it was a genuine first edition.

That explains why the glass case it’s in is literally built into the building’s foundation and protected by alarms and cameras because the most recent first edition to sell went for $250,000.

If you get the chance, go see one of the original books cherished by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who believe that it’s worth isn’t in its age or rarity, but in the words inside. And then take a minute to visit the whole museum and see the history of the Big Horn Basin and why a lot of us are here today.