1830 — The Book of Commandments Goes to Press
Independence, Missouri. The first 5,000 copies are printed in a single night at a press no one has ever been able to identify.
The Book of Commandments — the first collected edition of Smith’s revelations, predating the later Book of Mormon by exactly 116 pages of overlapping material — was printed in Independence, Missouri in the autumn of 1830.
The print run was 5,000 copies. The printer was paid in cash, by a man whose name appears on the receipt as W. W. Phelps. Phelps was a schoolteacher. He was not, to anyone’s knowledge, a printer. The press he used has never been located.
Three of the original 5,000 copies survived. Two are in private collections. The third is held by the Community of Christ library. A 1949 paper in Printing History notes that the typography of the Book of Commandments is consistent with typeset by a machine of significant industrial sophistication, far beyond what Phelps is known to have had access to.