Book of Mormon desecration

Is anybody else outraged at this?

------

Arizona woman selling Mormon scripture, page by page

By BETH DEFALCO
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

PHOENIX -- Retired bookstore owner Helen Schlie can see a higher
purpose in her decision to sell her 1830 first-edition Book of
Mormon one page at a time.

Schlie said she feels it will be more of a "missionary tool" if
broken apart rather than going to a single collector since the
framed pages - priced at $2,500 to $4,500 each - can be handed
down generation to generation.

"This way, it will touch hundreds of lives and span generations of
time," said Schlie, who is Mormon. "The book has now started a
whole new missionary career."

Her decision has garnered mixed reviews from the church, fellow
Mormon book dealers and librarians who think such a rare piece of
church history is better left whole.

Some librarians were appalled when they learned of Schlie's
intentions, said Haybron Adams, a retired librarian who worked in
the special collections division at Brigham Young University and
who authenticated Schlie's book. "But librarians have a different
look at books."

The Book of Mormon is the story of a Hebrew family who migrated
from Jerusalem to the New World and tells of a visit to their
descendants by Jesus Christ after his resurrection. It was first
published in 1830 by Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter Day Saints, after he said an angel named Moroni
guided him to gold tablets documenting the teachings and lives of
ancient tribes.

The book Schlie owns is one of the first 5,000 printed. Book
dealers say hundreds of complete works are likely left, although
there is no way to tell for sure.

Schlie said she came across her original copy working as a book
dealer in Mesa, Ariz., where she owned a book store for 25 years.

Though she can't remember the name of the man she bought it from
or exactly when, she had it authenticated by two collectors,
including Adams.

Adams said he and other librarians who specialize in rare books
looked at Schlie's copy about three years ago and had no doubt it
was a first-edition.

And, he said, Schlie was upfront about her intentions to split it
apart to sell - something he and the other librarians wished she
wouldn't have done.

Schlie said she offered it first to the church. "But they said
'No, go ahead and do this project because it will touch more lives
over the long run,'" Schlie said from her home in Gold Canyon,
east of Phoenix. "And the condition the book was in, it could not
be used for study. It was too fragile."

She said shied away from selling her complete copy to a collector
because she didn't want it hidden under glass or touched only by
scholars with white gloves.

"Hundreds of people have touched and felt the spirit of this book
already," Schlie said. "I wanted it to continue its usefulness."

Schlie has framed each page in a double-sided, purple heart-wood
frame and affixed a 14-karat gold Moroni angel on each side. The
signatures of both authenticators also accompany each page, she said.

Curt Bench, owner of Benchmark Books in Salt Lake City, which
specializes in Mormon literature, said there's a general sentiment
among book dealers that breaking up a complete work is "frowned upon."

"I won't pass personal judgment on anybody," he said, "but there
are some people that would have a problem with that."

Bench said that he, too, has sold pages from a first-edition Book
of Mormon. However, he said those pages were taken only from books
that were incomplete.

Bench said he sold the most desired pages - like the title page
and witness page - for $2,000 five years ago.

While book dealers have questioned whether Schlie's price is too
high, they all concede a collectors item is worth whatever a
collector will pay.

Depending on the condition, the average going rate for a complete
first-edition book is somewhere between $50,000 and $75,000, Bench
said.

If each of Schlie's pages sold for her minimum asking price of
$2,500, all 290 pages would bring in $725,000.

Schlie said she has sold "quite a few" through eBay and on her
personal Web site.

"One man reserved seven pages - one for of each of his children,"
she said.

The church shied away from criticizing Schlie for breaking apart
the scripture.

"Issues like these rest on our member's sense of propriety and
conscious," said Mike Otterson, an LDS spokesman in Utah.

Al Smith wonders:
Is anybody else outraged at this?

Not particularly.
What I am outraged at is the continuing waste of lives in Iraq and the
never-ending stream of lies emanating from the White House.

John A. Stovall sez:
What about government don't you understand? Why be outraged?

You're being particularly dense today Stovie old boy.
I believe that is about the stupidest thing you've ever said and,
coming from you, that's really saying something!
Have a nice day

"BobFinnan.com" wrote:

Al Smith wonders:
Is anybody else outraged at this?

Not particularly.
What I am outraged at is the continuing waste of lives in Iraq and the
never-ending stream of lies emanating from the White House.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a new winner...in less than four posts he
diverted the legitimate on-topic theme of the thread into a pointless
off-topic polemic of his personal political beliefs. Now THAT'S talent!

Sorry...not 'winner', what's the word? Oh yeah...wiener.

muted applause

Is anybody else outraged at this?



By which part ?

By the part where a relatively rare book is broken into individual
pages for no other reason than the greed of its owner. I thought
book collectors cared about such things. I do, and I'm not even a
collector. Personally, I hope this woman sells half a dozen pages
for a fraction of what she wants to get for them, and has to eat
the rest.

Al Smith wrote:

Is anybody else outraged at this?

By which part ?

By the part where a relatively rare book is broken into individual
pages for no other reason than the greed of its owner.

Actually, Al, the reasons given we

1. The framed pages "can be handed down generation to generation"
(whereas the book itself will soon fall apart).

2. The book "will touch hundreds of lives and span generations of time"
(whereas if it was sold to a private collector it would probably reach
very few people and perhaps not survive for very long).

3. "The book has now started a whole new missionary career" (God help
us! Not more Mormon missionaries!).

4. The seller offered it first to the Mormon Church. "But they said
'No'" (presumably because there are several hundred copies of the first
edition still knocking around).

5. The Mormon Church said "go ahead and do this project because it will
touch more lives over the long run" (I wonder if they were hoping for -
or perhaps assured of - a percentage of the profits!).

6. The book "could not be used for study. It was too fragile". (This is
a good point. Have you thought of a way to counter it?)

7. The seller didn't want to sell her complete copy to a collector,
"because she didn't want it hidden under glass or touched only by
scholars with white gloves". (Again, not a bad point, perhaps, though
it contradicts the previous one and one might question why a microfiche
copy wouldn't serve the scholars' purposes.)

8. Curt Bench, a Mormon bookseller whom the article cites as as a
critic of Schlie's plan to sell these sheets individually, has also
"sold pages from a first-edition Book of Mormon". (That does make one
wonder whether his criticism was just sour grapes.)

9. Everyone concedes that "a collectors item is worth whatever a
collector will pay". (In the end, that's the crunch. Democracy has sold
its soul to the market. Unless you want to buy out of that, you don't
have a leg to stand on.)

No trickery here, Al. I have only quoted from the article you pasted.
In fact, the only reason I *can't* find there is the one that says that
the book's owner is greedy!

As it happens, there is nothing in that article about what the owner
plans to do with the money. Perhaps she plans to give it to charity.
Personally, I hope she *doesn't* plough it into the Mormon Church, who
will use it (presumably, and inter alia) to send yet more besuited
young men who wear crash helmets while riding bicycles to be my near
neighbours here in Japan.

I'm not saying that your reason is spurious and the other reasons are
all God-given, but I'm far from being convinced that it's entirely the
other way around.

Just as a matter of interest, a poster who attempted to start a similar
thread on Exlibris has so far not had any response
(http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byfor.../msg00274.html),
even though the Exlibris mailing list has previously engaged in heated
debate on the issue of splitting books
(http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/cgi-b...brissearch.cgi). Again,
I'm not saying that the issue in itself isn't worthy of debate, but I
don't think it comes into the same class as those who got upset on
Exlibris six months ago.

I'm not unsympathetic to your point of view on this but a knee-jerk
reaction just isn't going to cut it, for the following reasons:

1. The market rules, and democracy is its handmaid, so unless you want
out at the most basic level I don't think there's really any case to
answer.

2. Even if, in this case, you consider them spurious, the above list of
reasons shows that there are issues that go beyond mere preservation
for the sake of it of a copy that's "over the hill", and those issues
need to be taken into consideration.

3. As the age in which technological preservation of the data contained
in books progresses, preserving old books will inevitably become more
and more a matter of sentiment, and less and less a matter of
preserving a heritage that will otherwise be irrevocably lost.

John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com

BobFinnan.com wrote:

Al Smith wonders:

Is anybody else outraged at this?

Not particularly.
What I am outraged at is the continuing waste of lives in Iraq and the
never-ending stream of lies emanating from the White House.

Knowing your predilection for wiping out the entire Muslim population
of the world, man, woman and child (http://tinyurl.com/8cpyc), I won't
pretend to take heart in your apparent concern for the waste of lives
in Iraq. I'm sure you're not concerned about
http://www.iraqbodycount.net/!

Still, as one greying bookman to another, and in a final, desperate
attempt to find some common ground, I wonder if you have noticed how
women just get more beautiful every day? This is something I whisper to
myself almost every time I walk the street or board a train these days.

Funnily enough, the utterance is not accompanied by a sense of outrage,
but by a feeling that perhaps I am coming to understand the meaning of
"Shanti" - "peace that passeth understanding".

Let's hope we both find it!

John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com

"John R. Yamamoto-Wilson" wrote in message
ups.com...

8. Curt Bench, a Mormon bookseller whom the article cites as as a
critic of Schlie's plan to sell these sheets individually, has also
"sold pages from a first-edition Book of Mormon". (That does make one
wonder whether his criticism was just sour grapes.)



John, the article says that Bench had sold individual leaves only from
incomplete copies. I spent part of my recent vacation reading about the
bookmen of the Silver Age of book collecting (John Carter, David Randall,
Percy Muir, etc.). They seem to have come to a pretty wide consensus that
it's acceptable to so use incomplete copies, but unacceptable with complete
copies.


For myself, I've come to the conclusion that people should do what they want
with their books. I hope they preserve them or use them in some significant
way (e.g. displaying disbound Audubon prints for ornithological study), but
we can't police everyone. Also I think these stories of book breaking often
reenforce the preservation instincts among the rest of us.



William M. Klimon
http://www.gateofbliss.com

Bill Klimon wrote:

John, the article says that Bench had sold individual leaves only from
incomplete copies.

I realise that. Still, some of those books might only be incomplete
because some previous owner sold or removed pages from them, and if he
was selling loose leaves without having the book itself then, unless
there's some proof of provenance, it's only his supposition that they
came from incomplete copies.

I spent part of my recent vacation reading about the bookmen of the Silver
Age of book collecting (John Carter, David Randall, Percy Muir, etc.). They
seem to have come to a pretty wide consensus that it's acceptable to so
use incomplete copies, but unacceptable with complete copies.

I realise that, too, but there doesn't seem to be a consensus on copies
that are complete but so beat-up they're on the verge of falling apart.

I've come to the conclusion that people should do what they want with their books.

Bill, they will anyway!

While we're on the topic, here's an interesting anecdote. For a couple
of years now I've been on the trail of a copy of a book by Isaac
Ambrose that was owned and annotated by John Bunyan. It was auctioned
in the 1920s and has gone to earth since then; its present whereabouts
are unknown.

However, some fragments of the margins, with Bunyan's annotations, have
surfaced. Apparently, these had been removed by the book's previous
author before it was auctioned (goodness knows why).

Now, it has long been known that Bunyan was not telling the truth when
he claimed the Bible as his only literary source of inspiration, but
still very little is known about how he related to and drew on other
texts. To have the whole book would be a wonderful thing, but given
that it's apparently lost the fact that the fragments are available is
better than nothing.

So, as it happens, the only parts of the book that remain - as far as
we know - are the fragments cut out by some "vandal" in the late
Victorian period. In other words, if he hadn't cut them out we would
have nothing, but at least now we have his fragments!

John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com

"John R. Yamamoto-Wilson" wrote in message
ups.com...

John, the article says that Bench had sold individual leaves only from
incomplete copies.

I realise that. Still, some of those books might only be incomplete
because some previous owner sold or removed pages from them, and if he
was selling loose leaves without having the book itself then, unless
there's some proof of provenance, it's only his supposition that they
came from incomplete copies.



A very lawyerly answer, if I may say so. Which calls for a lawyerly
response: There is no indication in the article he was referring to selling
loose leaves. But if he was, and assuming, ad arguendo, his good faith,
then he's not responsible for the actions of a breaker. By analogy with
legal logic, it's only the breaker who can possibly be responsible for the
breaking and bona fide purchasers are not culpable. Any other result seems
to me to argue for a moral ban on the buying and selling of leaves, as well
as of extracted plates, prints, and maps (which means most plates, prints,
and maps), and, hey, why not while we're at it, of individual volumes from
sets.



I realise that, too, but there doesn't seem to be a consensus on copies
that are complete but so beat-up they're on the verge of falling apart.



Quite. I wasn't defending Mrs. Bookbreaker; I was defending Bench the
Dealer. In fact, the condition argument is a terrible argument, when $100
or less can get one a perfectly serviceable, professional rebinding. Worst
case, one can have a box made.



I've come to the conclusion that people should do what they want with
their books.

Bill, they will anyway!



Yes, I realize that. I was focused more on the unstated corollary, namely
that we ought not to get so exercised about lawful book breaking.



William M. Klimon
http://www.gateofbliss.com