“Author and Proprietor” — Why Joseph Smith Filed the Copyright That Way

The 1830 title page names Joseph Smith “author and proprietor,” and critics read that line as a confession slipped out on the record. The 1790 statute, the clerk’s own record book, and the preface printed three pages later tell a different story.

The Argument

The objection has gotten sharper in recent years, and the sharper version deserves a real answer rather than a slogan. It runs like this:

The Four Claims

  • The little word “or” — the 1790 Act protected “authors and proprietors,” and the registration form said “author or proprietor.” Two categories, not one requirement.
  • A free choice — nothing in the statute forced the word “author” on him. He could have filed as proprietor alone and credited Mormon with the writing.
  • A confession — he took the word because it was true. He wrote the book, and for one moment in 1829 he said so where it counted.
  • A cover story — the Church now suggests the law required the word, and the law plainly did not.

Part of that is right, and an apologist who pretends otherwise is not worth reading. The statute did offer two categories, and no clause anywhere in it commands a filer to write the word “author” instead of the alternative. Anyone who says the law left him no option at all has not read the act. But the argument stops one question short of its own answer, and the question it skips is the one that decides the entire case: a proprietor under this statute holds a copyright he got from somebody — so got it from whom?

The Response

1. Congress Wrote Those Words, Not Joseph Smith

Section 3 of the 1790 Act does something modern statutes almost never do. It does not simply describe what a registration has to contain; it dictates the exact sentence the clerk is required to copy into his record book, blanks and parentheticals and all:

Copyright Act of 1790, Sec. 3

“… unless he shall before publication deposit a printed copy of the title of such map, chart, book or books, in the clerk’s office of the district court where the author or proprietor shall reside … hath deposited in this office the title of a map, chart, book or books, (as the case may be) the right whereof he claims as author or proprietor, (as the case may be)…”

Read that twice, then ask a simple question: whose sentence is it? The paired phrase is boilerplate. Congress printed both nouns into the mandatory form and then instructed the clerk to keep whichever one applied to the man standing in front of him — that is the entire function of the parenthetical “as the case may be.” Joseph Smith did not compose that language. He walked into a federal office and filled in a form Congress had drafted thirty-nine years before he was born into the argument.

Notice something else in the same section. What gets deposited is not the manuscript, and not the finished book. It is “a printed copy of the title.” The title page was the copyright document. Does that change how the attribution line ought to be read? It has to, because the phrase everyone argues about is sitting on a page that was drafted in part to satisfy a federal filing requirement, in precisely the spot where the statute wanted a claim of right recorded.

2. What He Actually Claimed at the Clerk’s Desk

On 11 June 1829, Richard R. Lansing, clerk of the United States District Court for the Northern District of New York, entered the registration. Here is the operative line exactly as Lansing wrote it:

Copyright for Book of Mormon, 11 June 1829

“Joseph Smith Junior of the said District, hath deposited in this Office the title of a book the right whereof he claims as author in the words following, to wit:”

Look at what the clerk kept and what he dropped. The statutory form offered “author or proprietor.” Lansing struck the alternative and wrote four words: he claims as author. In the federal record — the only place the claim carried legal weight, and the only place a rival printer would have had to attack it — there is a single category, and it is the author category. So where does the doubled phrase live? On the printed title page, which is a different kind of document doing an entirely different job.

That distinction matters for how the whole argument gets framed. Critics tend to describe Joseph as grabbing at two titles where one would have done, as though the second word were a boast he could not resist adding. What the record shows instead is a filer taking the one statutory category that fit his situation, and a printer setting the customary trade formula in type beneath the title several months afterward.

3. “Proprietor” Alone Was Not Actually on the Table

This is where the objection breaks, and it breaks on the same statute the objection leans on. Section 1 defines who may hold the right, and it defines proprietorship as something that arrives in your hands out of somebody else’s:

Copyright Act of 1790, Sec. 1

“… the author and authors of any map, chart, book or books … his or their executors, administrators or assigns, who hath or have not transferred to any other person the copyright … and any other person or persons … who hath or have purchased or legally acquired the copyright …”

There are two doors, and only two. Door one is the author, along with his executors, administrators, and assigns. Door two is anyone who purchased or legally acquired the right from a person who held it first. Proprietorship in this statute is derivative by definition — it is a title that came out of another person’s hands, which means it can always be traced backward, and a claim that cannot be traced backward is a claim that cannot be defended in court.

So picture Joseph Smith trying door two. He tells the clerk he is proprietor only and says nothing about authorship. What is the obvious follow-up question? Purchased from whom? Acquired by what conveyance? Name the author whose rights you now hold, and produce the assignment that moved them into your hands. Mormon had been dead fourteen hundred years and Moroni nearly as long, so there was no assignor to name, no bill of sale to file, and no signature anywhere on earth to point at.

A registration like that is worse than awkward. It is defective on its face, and any printer with a lawyer and a grudge would have said so inside of ten minutes. An entry claiming derived ownership with no author of record, no assignment, and no chain of title anywhere behind it is not legal protection at all — it is an engraved invitation to be pirated by the first man who notices.

And a rival printer did try. Abner Cole, writing as “Obadiah Dogberry,” had the run of Grandin’s shop on nights and Sundays, which happened to be where the Book of Mormon sheets were coming off the press. He announced on 9 December 1829 that he had “concluded to commence publishing extracts from it,” and on 2 January 1830 his Reflector began printing them. Joseph came in from Harmony to stop him. Cole’s paper of 13 January 1830 mentions “the copy-right,” the dispute went to arbitration, and the extracts ceased after the issue of 22 January.

Seven months after the filing, the copyright had to do real work against a real thief, and it held. So what is the practical answer to “he didn’t have to say author”? He did not have to say it. He did have to file something that would survive contact with a hostile printer working the very press his book was on, and only one of the statute’s two doors stood open to a man in his position.

4. In 1829, “Author” Was the Copyright Word for a Translator

The modern reader hears “author” and thinks the person who made up the words. Was that the working meaning in 1829? Not in the book trade, and not on a copyright page — and the documentary proof sits close enough at hand that nobody has to take the point on faith.

Documented Parallels

  • Thomas S. Brady, 1824 (New York) — A New Guide to Conversation, in Spanish and English. The title page calls him “teacher and translator of ancient and modern languages.” The copyright page on the very next leaf calls him “author and proprietor.”
  • Benjamin Boothroyd, 1824 (Huddersfield) — a printing of the King James Bible listing the translator-editor as “the author.” A British imprint, so it evidences trade custom rather than American filing practice.
  • Wyatt v. Barnard, 1814 — English authority treating a translation as protectable in the translator’s own right.
  • Lesser v. Sklarz, 1859 (C.C.S.D.N.Y.) — an American court holding English translations of Old Testament portions copyrightable.

The Brady volume is the one to sit with. Same man. Same book. Five years before Palmyra. On one page he is the translator, and on the facing page he is the “author and proprietor” — the identical phrase, in the identical position, serving the identical legal purpose. Nobody has ever accused Thomas Brady of secretly inventing the Spanish language, so why should the same two words carry a confession when a farmer in Palmyra uses them five years later?

The ordinary religious usage of the day pushed in the same direction. Joseph’s readers had the King James Bible in their heads, where Christ is “the author of eternal salvation” and “the author and finisher of our faith.” Did any reader in 1829 take those verses to mean God had personally sat down and composed a manuscript? An author, in that register, is the one who brings a thing forth and stands behind it.

5. The Same Volume Calls Him the Translator — Including in the Same Sentence

If the word was a slip, it was a slip surrounded on every side by its own correction. Start with the title page itself. Directly above the attribution line, the text describes a record “written by the hand of Mormon,” “sealed by the hand of Moroni,” and brought forth “by the gift and power of God unto the interpretation thereof.” Then, at the foot of that same page:

Book of Mormon, 1830 edition, title page

“BY JOSEPH SMITH, JUNIOR, AUTHOR AND PROPRIETOR. PALMYRA: PRINTED BY E. B. GRANDIN, FOR THE AUTHOR. 1830.”

Even the imprint is a trade formula. “Printed for the author” was the standard phrase meaning a book had been produced at the expense of the person who owned it, rather than at a publisher’s risk. It tells you who paid Grandin. It says nothing whatever about who composed the text.

Turn the leaf, and the preface settles the matter. In a few hundred words explaining the loss of the 116 pages, Joseph uses the verb translate six separate times:

Book of Mormon, 1830 edition, preface

“I would inform you that I translated, by the gift and power of God, and caused to be written, one hundred and sixteen pages … and being commanded of the Lord that I should not translate the same over again …” Signed, “THE AUTHOR.”

A man signs himself “the author” at the bottom of a paragraph in which he has just said six times over that he translated. The two words are interchangeable in his own hand, on one page, in the first edition, printed for anybody in Palmyra to buy and read. What more would a critic need?

Then there are the witness statements at the back of the same volume. The Three Witnesses affirm that the plates “have been translated by the gift and power of God.” And the Eight Witnesses manage to put both labels inside a single sentence:

Testimony of the Eight Witnesses, 1830 edition

“… that Joseph Smith, Jr. the Author and Proprietor of this work, has shewn unto us the plates of which hath been spoken … and as many of the leaves as the said Smith has translated, we did handle with our hands…”

One sentence. Eleven words apart. He is the “Author and Proprietor,” and the leaves are the ones “the said Smith has translated.” If the first phrase is a confession of composition, what is the second phrase doing there, retracting it before the sentence has even reached its end? Eight men signed that statement, and Grandin set it in type during the same press run that produced the title page the critics like to quote.

6. He Treated the Copyright as Property Because It Was Property

The commercial side of this story is real, and it is better told plainly than defensively. Martin Harris mortgaged 151 acres to Egbert B. Grandin on 25 August 1829 to secure $3,000 for a run of 5,000 copies, the book was first priced at $1.75, and the price later came down to $1.25. On 16 January 1830 Joseph signed this:

Agreement with Martin Harris, 16 January 1830

“I hereby agree that Martin Harris shall have an equal privilege with me & my friends of selling the Book of Mormon of the Edition now printing by Egbert B Grandin until enough of them shall be sold to pay for the printing of the same.”

Read the instrument closely. What does it actually convey? A privilege of selling, capped at the printing cost, and not one thing beyond that. It does not transfer the copyright, and it does not promise Harris a penny of profit. Joseph kept the underlying right and licensed the sales, which is exactly what a proprietor does with property he intends to keep. The mortgaged land was sold on 7 April 1831, and the books moved badly because Palmyra had organized itself against buying them.

That same ownership shows up in the Canadian episode. In early 1830 a revelation directed Oliver Cowdery, Hiram Page, Josiah Stowell, and Joseph Knight Sr. to seek a buyer for a copyright at Kingston, in Upper Canada. David Whitmer’s 1887 recollection says Toronto, but the contemporaneous revelation text and Hiram Page’s 1848 letter both point to Kingston, and Page was one of the men who went. No purchaser was found. Page later wrote flatly that “there was no purchaser neither were they authorized at Kingston.”

The attempt failed. What does it demonstrate? Ownership. You cannot send four men across a frozen lake to sell a copyright you do not hold, and no one on either side of that errand in 1830 seems to have questioned that this one was his to send.

7. Why the Line Changed in 1837

The second edition, printed at Kirtland in 1837, carries a different line: “TRANSLATED BY JOSEPH SMITH, Jr.” Critics sometimes present that as a quiet retreat from an embarrassing word. Was anything actually retreated from?

Nothing was withdrawn, and nothing was corrected. The 1829 filing had already done its work — the registration was recorded, the fourteen-year term was running, and Abner Cole had been faced down and stopped. A title page in 1837 was speaking to readers rather than to a district clerk, so the descriptive word took the place of the statutory one. The book had been calling him a translator on the inside since 1830. In 1837 the outside simply caught up.

The Verdict

The critic’s reading of the statute is correct as far as it goes. Congress did name two categories, and no line of the act commanded Joseph Smith to write the word “author.” Anybody claiming the law left him no choice whatsoever has overstated the case, and the overstatement should be dropped rather than defended.

But two categories on paper are not two categories in practice. The proprietor door in Section 1 opens only for a person who “purchased or legally acquired” the right from an author who can be named, and Joseph had no assignor, no conveyance, and no living rights-holder anywhere in the chain behind him. What he had was a manuscript produced under his own hand and a printing bill secured against Martin Harris’s farm. In the vocabulary the statute handed him, and in the vocabulary the book trade already used for translators, that made him the author of the copyright.

He also never left the point ambiguous. The clerk recorded a claim “as author” on a deposited title page describing an ancient record that required “the interpretation thereof by the gift of God.” The preface says he translated, six times over, and signs itself “THE AUTHOR.” Eight men signed a statement calling him the Author and Proprietor of leaves he had translated. Every one of those documents came off the same press, in the same year, for the same buyers to read for a dollar seventy-five.

Now consider what a forger would have to be doing here. He announces his authorship on the cover as a confession, and then three pages later he tells every purchaser in plain English that he translated the thing by the gift and power of God. Which page is the lie meant for? Which one is the truth? A man covering his tracks does not print the confession and the cover-up eleven words apart in the same sentence and then hand it to eight witnesses to sign.

The word on the 1830 title page is a filing caption. It tells you who owned the copyright and who would sue a pirate, and within seven months it did precisely that job against Abner Cole. It was never a statement about where the text came from. The book answers that question itself, in Joseph’s own preface, in language nobody has ever needed a lawyer to interpret.

Sources

Primary Documents

Secondary Scholarship