A first-edition Book of Mormon recently sold for $250,000 at an auction house in Wilton, Connecticut.
The quarter-million dollar auction selling price set a new world record, according to Reid Moon — owner and collector of the books, documents and artifacts at Moon’s Rare Books in Utah.
“That $250,000 is the current world record,” Moon told the Deseret News in a Friday interview. He said he would not be surprised to see another copy — especially one in better conditions — break the record again before the end of the year.
“Every time there’s an auction, I expect it to break the record,” he said.
The previous record for a first-edition copy of the Book of Mormon was set last year in September, when another copy was auctioned off at $240,000 in Chicago.
Before then, the record auction selling price had been $180,000, and that record price had been set in 2007 for a copy that had belonged to Orson Pratt, a former apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“I would not be surprised to see a first-edition copy of the Book of Mormon sell for $1 million in the next 10 years,” Moon told the Deseret News in September.
He reaffirmed this claim Friday, saying there’s a growing number of buyers interested in acquiring a first-edition copy of the book.
A first edition Book of Mormon, one of two copies in their collection, is displayed in the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 10, 2024. | Provided by Eastin Hartzell
“It is a very active market,” Moon said. “People are so excited to make this acquisition. People appreciate the history of the book, and so it creates a pretty competitive market.”
Moon said he himself bid on the recently sold copy, becoming the second underbidder when the copy finally sold Wednesday, Feb. 18. He shared he had actually seen the copy in person before it was put up for auction and said the copy was in “good condition.”
“This copy would be likely be a 6 or a 6.5 on a 1-to-10 scale,” he said. “A copy of better condition would have sold for over $300,000.”
A longtime collector, Moon said he has bought and sold hundreds of copies, sometimes at higher prices. “The $250,000 is the current world record (auction selling price), but copies have sold higher in private sales,” he explained.
In September, he said it’s long been assumed that roughly 10% of the 5,000 first-edition copies that were printed in 1830 by E.B. Grandin in Palmyra, New York, had survived.
The fact that he has sold more than 300 copies in the past 25 years leads him to believe the number of surviving copies is closer to 750 to 800, he said.
He then described how the price for these first-edition copies has gone from $1.25 to now more than $200,000 over the course of 195 years.
A first-edition copy of the Book of Mormon usually sells for more than a first-edition “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen or a first-edition set of “The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien, Moon said for context. These typically sell for about $150,000 or $100,000, respectively.
There’s never a first-edition copy of the Book of Mormon “just sitting out there on somebody’s website waiting to be sold,” Moon told the Deseret News in September. “I literally have dozens of people on a waiting list waiting for a copy.”
