Secular Book of Mormon: Will it sell?

In the publishing business, it must be some kind of record: 175 years after the manuscript is completed, it finally gets picked up by a big time New York City publishing house.

The announcement last week that the Book of Mormon will be published by Doubleday comes exactly 175 summers since June 1829, when Joseph Smith Jr. first approached Egbert B. Grandin, a printer in Palmyra, N.Y., to print a manuscript of about 270,000 words that Smith said was a translation off golden plates he'd found in a nearby hill after an angel told him where they were.

Joseph Smith would have been accused of plagiarizing Stephen King, but Stephen King wasn't born yet.

Grandin, as the story goes, wasn't as concerned about the outlandish story of the text's origin as he was about what printers have always been concerned about: Could Smith afford the printing?

And like most authors, then and now, Smith couldn't.

But he had a friend who could.

Martin Harris, a wealthy Palmyra farmer, wheeled in $3,000 for a run of 5,000 leather-bound copies of the Book of Mormon. Historians estimate that about 500 books from that first run still exist, mostly in private collections. The going price on the open market for one of them is as high as $50,000.

Or, you could pay the $25 Doubleday says it will charge for its "secular" edition, meaning the book will be presented in regular paragraph form, without footnotes and scriptural chapters and verses.

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People in Utah, of course, where the Book of Mormon is literally part of the landscape, are wondering why anyone would pay $25 for a Book of Mormon when they can buy one at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Distribution Center for $2.50, or, for that matter, easily get one free.

Then again, the $25 version comes with no strings attached. Two people with name tags will not follow you home from Barnes & Noble on their bikes and ask if you'd like to, you know, know more.

At least I don't think they will.

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The Doubleday deal isn't exactly a gamble. The LDS Church prints about 5 million copies of the Book of Mormon every year, in 76 languages. Since those first 5,000 copies came off the presses in Palmyra in March 1830, more than 120 million copies of the book have been printed by the church. The 100 million mark was passed in the year 2000.

If Joseph Smith had cut a basic 15 percent royalty deal in 1830, he'd be richer than John Grisham.