Smudged ink, faded characters,

poor handwriting: Scholars share their insight on what they found when they put the magnifying glass on the Joseph Smith papers.

KJZZ television, in cooperation with the Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, presents this weekly series highlighting the research of scholars and historians as they prepare for the publication of The Joseph Smith Papers. And now your host, Glenn Rawson.

Hello, I’m Glenn Rawson.

Last week, we joined some scholars who gave us excellent insight into why the publication of the Joseph Smith papers is so critical to people within and without the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

We conclude our special inside look at the Papers Project this week with the scholars discussing how they do their work and what you can expect from it.

Plus, a peek at some of the surprises they’ve discovered as they've done the exhaustive work of verifying key documents.

Finally, we'll have the compelling story about the very first summary in book form of Church history and doctrine authorized by Joseph Smith.

The book was published by a non-Mormon,

but it was a fitting and final triumph for Joseph.

Let's talk a few moments about what documentary editing really means in practice, using the Joseph Smith Papers as the example.

It's pretty straightforward and simple.

You find the documents, you transcribe the documents,

you publish the documents, and it should be done, right?

But in practice, it's anything but straightforward.

Would you like to talk about the gathering, for example?

We think about Joseph Smith. He was this incredible figure, religious figure.

He's clearly important to members of the church.

But if we're scholars of religious history,

they need to know about Joseph Smith. They need to know who he was.

And people in the past have collected documents,

gathered them together, but they’re scattered throughout the country, throughout the world.

We have repositories at Yale, Pennsylvania Historical Society on the East Coast, many institutions in California, Utah. There's so many documents scattered throughout

the United States, a big bunch in Independence, Missouri, the Community of Christ Archives.

So gathering the documents isn't just a matter of going to one archives and saying,

“Give me all the documents on Joseph Smith.”

They are scattered. And so we have to send out people to

all these different repositories to make a register, basically, of all the documents, make photocopies, scanned copies of them,

bring them to one's place so that we have

a control file of all the known documents throughout the country.

After you’ve gathered documents,

you’d think you’d have a good start at it,

but we have many different versions of some documents, and we have to sort out which is the best, the earliest,

the text we want to feature.

And even at that point, we're hardly done,

it's then necessary to transcribe the text,

which is not straightforward either.

Robin, would you talk to us a few moments from a text verifier’s point of view

of some of the complexities of transcribing the Joseph Smith texts. Sure. We have one person make a transcription,

just an initial transcription from a digital image of the original. Once they are done,

he or she goes through and verifies the transcription,

checking spelling, punctuation, make sure that everything that's on the original is on the paper as well. The second level of verification goes to the volume editors, and they read—we have two people read it, one from the original, from a digital copy of the original, and the other is reading the transcription that's already made. This is what we call a tandem blind read. So, two people reading it

and they're not looking over each other's shoulder.

The person reading the original, it's quite tempting to peek over and see what the transcription says, if it's a difficult word.

But that defeats the purpose of getting this truly independent read. And then the final, the third level verification, is done from the original manuscript whenever possible. There are some when we have an old photocopy of a manuscript that’s now missing— we can’t go up to the original, obviously—but whenever possible, we use the original. And the original, you tend to find some things that you just can’t see in scanned images, no matter how high resolution they are.

There have been times when an ink blot has obscured the text under that blot in an image, but having the original, sometimes holding it up to the light or something, you can read under that ink blot, or other marks

that just do not show up in digital images.

So using the original is—

it's the best that we can do.

And there are times when we have magnification that we use.

Ultraviolet light sometimes brings out some of the text.

I've got an example here. This is in one of Joseph Smith's journals.

The last page there had a little bit of water damage, so you can see a little bit of mold here,

and it’s kind of hard to see.

But as you zoom in to this,

it has Oliver Cow. and one can assume it’s Oliver Cowdery.

But here we have a block of multispectral imaging where they've taken a digital image of this at different spectrums of

the ultraviolet light. And it’s

remarkable at how distinct you can read the Oliver Cowdery here, and same as up above here, the mold virtually disappears.

We have some interesting examples of corrections we've been able to make because of this.

Now, folks have been looking carefully at the text for a long time. Dean Jessee’s work corrected many errors.

One of the most interesting cases was to remove from a genealogy chart an unknown child.

Do you have that image that we could see?

I do. Let's pull that out.

So in the History of the Church, we have an entry in Nauvoo. It says, “On my return home”—this is Joseph— “On my return home, I found my wife Emma sick.

She was delivered of a son which did not survive its birth.”

So this is published in the History of the Church. Scholars reading this say, “Okay, Emma had a stillbirth.”

So that's critical in understanding the relationship between Joseph and Emma,

understanding Emma's health.

So, and going back to the Manuscript History, which is what the History of the Church is based on, it says the exact same thing.

But going even further, to the original journal,

we find an interesting difference.

It says, “At home, Sister Emma sick. She had another chill.”

And the readers of the History interpreted that as child, not chill, and so they’ve read child and said, “Well, if she really had a child, we don't know about it, so it must have died.”

So they’ve written into the History that “delivered of a son which did not survive the birth.”

We also had another interesting example in the Nauvoo journals, Willard Richards’s script.

Yeah. Willard Richards was a doctor, and maybe the stereotype of doctors having bad handwriting even extended to the 19th century, but Richard— In fact, Alex Smith and Andrew Hedges, who did the work on this text,

said they weren’t sure they’d ever forgive Joseph Smith for having a doctor be his scribe.

So we’ve have Willard Richards writing quite hurriedly. I think this is in the middle of a sermon or words of Joseph.

He’s trying to capture as much of Joseph as he possibly can.

He’s just been to an experience before the judge in another city, and he’s come back home, and he’s explaining the experience. And so it is a discourse that Willard is trying to capture very quickly.

And the original transcription that's been published has the text is reading, in describing this experience, “One spiritual-minded circuit judge and several fit men.”

So, Joseph is describing this as some of the positive experience. Well, under close scrutiny of the document,

it says—it’s slightly different. It says, “One spindle-shanked circuit judge and several fat men.”

So you can see the complete opposite meaning of the text here,

perhaps indicative a little bit of how he was feeling of

the legal process of the day.

Indeed. Now, Karen, you have also have one with John Whitmer where the text you read is very different from what has been transcribed and published before.

Yes. The Book of John Whitmer is part of Histories volume 1, an early history of the Church, and John Whitmer, after he was assigned as historian in 1831,

began gathering information and eventually began to keep a history but eve— He was excommunicated from the church;

he became very disenchanted with the church.

He continued writing in his history.

And a man by the name of James Strang

claimed leadership of the Church, and a fairly sizable number of Saints followed him. For a while,

John Whitmer was one of those who followed him.

And in one of the last chapters of his history,

Whitmer talks about James Strang.

He comes back later and crosses out what he said about James Strang. But it can still be read under his strikethroughs. And the Book of John Whitmer has been edited and published previously.

But to this point, I don't know of a publication that has correctly given

a sentence that is quite significant, quite important. I was staring at this one day— we do a lot of staring at things as documentary editors—and

the crossed-out Strang prophecy about Joseph Smith had been transcribed as, “Thou shalt thereby do a mission;

thy wife is better.” It didn’t seem to make too much sense, and I looked at it for a while,

thought I had a little spark of enlightenment, and went to see Rob Jensen down the hall, who is so good with texts. And I said, “I think this says—” It doesn’t say, “Thou shalt thereby do a mission.” It says, “Thou shalt surely die a martyr.” It doesn’t say, “Thy wife is better.” It says, “Thy cup is bitter.” That part has been published correctly in one previous edition.

Well, getting the text right requires a great deal of time and effort, and we put that effort in.

That doesn't end the complexities.

Then we have to figure out what we're going to actually deliver.

What kind of transcription? Eric, maybe you can—

Well, you’ve got some samples of

the styles that we have to choose between, and then Eric can talk to the detail within those styles that we have to also sort out. Sure. We're constantly thinking about our audience and what they would prefer. We're providing these documents.

And for a lot of people,

they might not care about the misspellings or the misplaced punctuation or things like that,

the elements of the manuscripts that to them don’t matter. They just want to know the content of the document. And for a lot of people, that’s satisfactory.

And that’s perfectly legitimate in some documentary editions.

It’s what we call a clear text, where we— where documentary editors clean up the text. They correct the spelling, add punctuation where needed.

This is all done silently so people can read the text and not be distracted by some of the misspellings,

they call it barbed wire, some of the editorial markings in the transcription that make it a little bit difficult.

We chose to not go that route for a variety of reasons.

Scholars— It could be argued that clear text was available in History of the Church. They published so many documents there where it was very readable text and members of the church have been using that volume for quite some time.

To the other end of the spectrum really is just to simply provide scans of the documents themselves.

But again, this is also difficult for people to read. As we’ve talked about third-level verification,

people can read this in a lot of different ways. They can mistake words for other words.

So, well, this is a solution that many documentary editions work from. We have chosen to go a different route.

And it's kind of in between the two,

the photographic facsimile and the clear text, and it provides all of the misspellings as they are in the manuscript. The punctuation as it is. And that, we have found, is not too distracting for scholars to use,

and it provides a sense that they are really getting basically what the manuscript says, that they can, if they want to quote it in a scholarly article, they can clean it up themselves.

But we've provided the foundation in which they can do that. Another option that we have done on a few volumes is what's called a typographic facsimile,

and this provides the manuscript in a much more detailed manner. So we have the line breaks where they are in the manuscript,

the spellings again, and what’s interesting on this particular document is we’ve got—it’s quite noticeable on the manuscript—where they’ve— in 19th century they tried to use as much space as possible on paper, so what they’ve done is they’ve turned the page over and written in the margin. And on a typographical facsimile, we would do the same, where the text is exactly as you see it

on the document itself.

Now, we gratefully have the option of not totally having to choose between these

interesting possibilities because on the website we can deliver all of those.

And so the day will come when you can see the photographic facsimile,

you can see a typographical facsimile taken from it literally, you can see a cleaned-up clear text, or you can see something like what we publish in the volumes.

Now, once we've decided the text, it still hasn’t solved the question of how we present it, because there are lots of editorial things to go into this:

editorial decisions in terms of style

and then finally typographical decisions in terms of design.

Eric, would you give us a short course of that?

Sure. Editors often use the word style, and sometimes I wonder if outsiders know what we mean.

It doesn’t mean our hairdos or our clothes,

and editors often aren’t very good in those areas anyway.

When we talk about style, we’re talking about editorial policy. When you prepare transcription for publication or prepare any kind of document for publication,

whether you're writing it or editing it,

you will come again and again on the same types of questions.

Are we going to capitalize this word? For example, Nauvoo Charter. This is the founding document for the city of Nauvoo.

Do we capitalize the C in charter or not?

That's going to come up again and again. We need to have an editorial decision on that.

Where are we using italics? What is our citation format?

What order do we present different elements in

when we’re presenting these documents? As a production editor,

you will be the last person to see

the manuscript before it goes to the printer. No one will see it after you. And that's a very frightening position to be in.

Now, once we have all of these style issues decided and we have

a text transcribed and we have prepared annotation around it—

we won't take time at this moment to talk much about the annotation, but the other part of what we’re trying to do is make these documents accessible in terms of being intelligible, comprehensible.

And if you only read the text in isolation, not knowing the context, the setting, the allusions it makes,

then it’s very difficult sometimes to understand even if the text is right. And then we have to figure out how to actually deliver this information. And the design is another challenge.

Just show us the sample of how we've come up with designs that will encapsulate the first volume.

What I’d first like to show is a possible layout or design of the cover of the first volume.

Now this isn’t a final design,

but this has been prepared by our designer.

And I’ve found, in working on this project, because of the work that people have been putting in over the years,

the historians and editors are very excited to see anything that looks like it’s in near-final format. So the volumes will apparently be available in leather as well as in cloth, so this would be what it might look like in leather.

The same designer showed kind of a vision of what it might look like when we have a number of volumes out and they're all sitting side by side on the shelf.

You could call this a sort of vision document, and it shows the different volumes and the different series sitting side by side. And this kind of thing can inspire us when we're losing morale.

I think this is a treat to be able to look at this today.

We have delivered the manuscript of the first volume to the typesetter. And what we're looking at here is the actual layout of a part of this manuscript.

This is the layout for Joseph Smith’s journal for 1832 to 1834, his first Ohio journal.

What you see here is a photograph of

the journal itself, with a quill pen showing the size of the volume. When these photos are published, they'll actually be much better quality. This is just a photo printed off on a LaserJet printer.

You see here the source note.

This gives bibliographic information about the journal that you might use when you’re citing it,

and then we describe the volume itself.

We describe the physical artifact, talk about the binding,

the glue and all this kind of thing.

We then have a provenance note that talks about how it’s been in Church custody and how we know that it’s an authentic Joseph Smith document.

Over here you’ll see a photograph of the first page of the journal, and if you compare, you can see what the original is and how we've transcribed it.

You can see strike-out here.

Joseph Smith wrote this and then he struck it out himself. And so that’s what you can gather by looking at our transcription there. Diamonds indicate illegible characters.

This indicates an illegible word.

So you can see that we're going to great care to give you an accurate transcription of the original.

One thing folks ask is, how do you protect yourself against forgeries, as we had with Mark Hofmann in the 1980s?

And one of the ways we do that is we are very careful. We have skilled archivists and document specialists looking at these things,

and we provide normally a chain of custody and information about the document that helps assure that we know where this has been, where it came from, and what it is.

It's been a great privilege for all of us to work on these volumes and exciting to see them coming to the point where they can be shared broadly with folks.

I'm confident that people will find a lot of meaning, whether they're looking at these as scholarly texts to understand

or if they’re looking at them as religious texts that they want to feel connected to.

I think each of our folks has had personal experiences with

the documentary editing experience and with the documents we've become close to.

And Karen, I wonder if you would share with us some of your feelings from working on the histories.

I brought a book with me today that was a birthday present for my last birthday.

This is an 1844 edition of a book called An Original History of the Religious Denominations at Present Existing in the United States.

Most members of the church have heard of the Wentworth letter,

I think. When I was a Primary child, I memorized the Articles of Faith as all Primary children still do,

and I remember being taught that Joseph Smith wrote these 13 articles of faith as part of a letter to an editor named John Wentworth. That happened in 1842.

And Wentworth had asked for that information on behalf of a friend of his, a writer by the name of George Barstow.

And neither of them made any use of the information that Joseph Smith had sent.

The Wentworth letter was published in the Times and Seasons, the Church’s periodical, so that was important for members of the Church, but this was not the national non-Mormon press in some form

that would publish a fair statement made by

the Saints themselves.

Well, the next year in 1843, a similar request came to Joseph.

A man, an editor by the name of Israel Daniel Rupp,

who lived in Pennsylvania, was compiling this book,

An Original History of the Religious Denominations at Present Existing in the United States. He extended

an invitation to Joseph Smith in Nauvoo to provide an essay for his volume. So it of course occurred to Joseph Smith that in their filing cabinet, so to speak, they already had an essay,

the one that they had sent to Wentworth.

He pulled it out, had William W. Phelps update it with some current information about Nauvoo and about the spread of missionary work.

They sent it off to Professor Rupp,

and the thing that makes this so touching is not just that it was published in this book, but the timing of this. Just about two weeks before Joseph Smith was killed, this book, not this very one, but an 1844 edition of History of All the Religious Denominations, arrived on his doorstep.

This book that I have still has some of the original gilt on it. It's quite beautiful. You think of this coming into Joseph Smith's hands, what this meant to him.

It was probably one of the most beautiful-looking books he’d ever owned personally.

And then for him to turn to the Table of Contents.

There are 42 denominations listed,

including “Latter Day Saints. By Joseph Smith,” here,

alphabetized very near the Jews and the Lutherans, denominations that had existed for hundreds

or thousands of years, and here in this very respectable company

and without any editorial changes at all.

Professor Rupp was a very responsible documentary editor in that way. He published exactly what he had been sent. Here, on page 404, “The Latter Day Saints. By Joseph Smith.”

And I think what this would have meant to him at this very difficult time. He was being hunted, he was being threatened, he knew that not only was he in danger, all the Saints in Nauvoo were in danger.

A terrible time, a terrible time of immense stress.

His enemies figured, and it would have seemed logical, if they could get rid of Joseph Smith, that would be the end of the Saints.

All the thoughts that must have been going through his mind at that time. Here came this book. Here he was for everyone to see.

Joseph Smith loved religious discussion. He loved the idea of different denominations making their statement and of people being able to compare our statement with someone else’s.

And he wrote a letter on the 5th of June 1844.

Very near—it’s the month of his martyrdom.

“Dear sir, your book, together with your note, has safely reached me, and I feel very thankful for so valuable a treasure. The design, the propriety,

the wisdom of letting every sect tell its own story and the elegant manner in which the work appears have filled my breast with encomiums upon it. Wishing you Godspeed.

Your work will be suitably noticed in our papers for your benefit. With great respect, I have the honor to be your obedient servant, Joseph Smith.”

And there’s an endorsement from Joseph Smith for a Joseph Smith editor, and I sort of dream that our work can have that same kind of approval.

And one day before he was killed,

on the 26th of June 1844, the promised endorsement did appear in the Nauvoo Neighbor. He recommended the book to all the Saints. As it said, “It is worth its weight in gold.

The author has our blessing for his success.”

And it just seems to me that in this terrible time of persecution and confusion that just must have been so,

so hard for Joseph Smith, it was the Lord’s way of putting His arms around him and saying, “Look. Look at the company you were in.

You are so new, you are so small,

but here you are represented as you wish to be.”

That is quite a story,

and we could hope for nothing better as a seal of approval on our labors, is to have him one day say, as he did to Daniel Rupp, “Well done, you documentary editors.”

Thanks for joining us for this special inside edition of The Joseph Smith Papers.

Next week, we return to our regular format and pick up

the remarkable story of the translation of the Book of Mormon. There are basically two theories that people have proposed about how Joseph Smith used the interpreters or the seer stone.

And the evidence is really quite strong that Joseph Smith saw an actual text in English. Please join us then.