caspianrex

Hm...can't figure out why that last comment double-posted. Also, there doesn't seem to be any option for me to delete the duplicate comment. Weird.

Your criticism of the binding is certainly valid, and you're definitely right about the book not lying flat. However, compared to the paperback-only Maxwell Institute Study Edition (as well as the paperback version of Hardy's original Reader's Edition), I think the hardcover is a vast improvement. As to the cover, I like the artwork, but the typeface isn't very creative. (Looks like it may just be Times New Roman?)

Your criticism of the binding is certainly valid, and you're definitely right about the book not lying flat. However, compared to the paperback-only Maxwell Institute Study Edition (as well as the paperback version of Hardy's original Reader's Edition), I think the hardcover is a vast improvement. As to the cover, I like the artwork, but the typeface isn't very creative. (Looks like it may just be Times New Roman?)

All right! My copy of The Annotated Book of Mormon arrived last night. I haven't had the chance to really dig into it deeply yet, but I do have a few preliminary thoughts to share, as well as a few pictures of the book. First, I think this book is ideal for readers like myself, someone who is not a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but who is interested in The Book of Mormon as a religious work of great importance. Grant Hardy's excellent Introduction makes his position as an active member quite clear, but he also is clearly striving for an academic, literary approach to the text. It is clear that the publisher, Oxford University Press, is approaching the layout and design of the book as it would any major religious text, be it the Bible, the Qur'an, or the Tao Te Ching. I am very pleased with the amount of material at the end of the book, after the actual Book of Mormon text. Hardy provides general essays on topics such as The Transmission and Language of the Text, The Book of Mormon and the Bible (I'm very interested in this one), and Book of Mormon Theology.Maps and Charts in the end material look very helpful for any reader (member or non-member) who is interested in Book of Mormon geography, or the various major family lines mentioned in the text. There is also a chart of biblical quotations, allusions and verbal parallels between the Bible and the Book of Mormon, which Hardy says in his Introduction is the most complete chart of its kind to date. Overall, the layout is quite similar to annotated Bibles published by OUP. It bears a remarkable similarity to OUP's Jewish Annotated New Testament, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Mark Zvi Brettler. In the photos I took of the book (linked below), I have included one pic that shows The Annotated Book of Mormon and The Jewish Annotated New Testament side-by-side. I hope to share more thoughts on the book once I've had a chance to delve into it a bit more deeply. If anyone else has acquired the book, I'd love to hear their thoughts as well. ANNOTATED BOOK OF MORMON PHOTOS

Just got a shipping update from Amazon, and The Annotated Book of Mormon should be arriving by this Saturday! Looking forward to receiving it, and seeing how the finished work turned out.

I am not a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, so I don't really have a horse in this race, but I would point out that there are plenty of scholarly Bibles out there in which the books are not presented in the order in which they were written. Granted, with the Bible, a much longer work that was written over the course of several hundred years, it is much more difficult to determine the actual chronological order of the writings. All I'm saying is that, whereas it might be interesting for readers of The Book of Mormon to see the books in the order in which they were dictated, I suspect the vast majority of readers would not find it useful to do so.

Looking more closely at the two editions, it seems to me that the major difference (apart from minor punctuation changes mentioned in my previous comment) between the editions is the completely different introductory material. Just looking at random spots in the text, everything seems to line up identically. That being said, this information is found on the back cover of the second edition:

I haven't done a systematic comparison of the two editions, but I'm pretty sure he made some changes in the text itself. I know one punctuation change off the top of my head: on the Title Page, he added a comma between "plates" and "taken" in the phrase "upon plates taken from the plates of Nephi." (I think, based on a discussion I had on this forum a few years ago, that punctuation change may have been added to a later printing of the first edition.)

[This isn't breaking news or anything, but it looked as if the topic had not been discussed yet on this forum.] For several years now, one of my favorite editions of The Book of Mormon in my collection has been The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text, edited by Royal Skousen. Originally published in 2009, this edition of the BoM attempts, insofar as it is possible, to reconstruct the earliest text as it was dictated to Joseph Smith's scribes. Based on Skousen's work on the Critical Text Project for the past many years, the edition represents some of the best work in LDS textual scholarship out there, in a format that encourages the reader to understand the text they are reading. Skousen's use of "sense lines" in a single-column format helps to achieve that goal, I believe. The recent 2nd edition of the version almost flew under my radar, as it was published in 2022, and I almost missed it. The updated edition reflects some of Skousen's textual choices based on the work he has done in the years since the first edition was published. The first edition had an excellent Introduction by Grant Hardy (whose Annotated Book of Mormon published by Oxford University Press will be coming out soon), as well as a Preface by Skousen. The second edition has a brand new Introduction, penned by Skousen himself, and it is a wonderfully concise guide ro the work of textual criticism as it applies to The Book of Mormon. My only disappointment with the second edition is that the publisher chose to issue the book only in paperback, albeit a fairly sturdy paperback. At least the new format is considerably easier to carry around than its predecessor, which is a pretty hefty volume. I would be interested in hearing any perspectives on this publication that people on this forum may have. (By the way, if you're not familiar with Skousen's Yale Edition, you can read the first edition on the Book of Mormon Central website.)