The Joseph Smith Papers and Larry H. Miller

[Hemidakota]

ARTICLE EXCERPT: What we did was provide funding for the project and hire a great team of scholars, archivists, manuscript experts, and so forth to examine Church history documents. We gave BYU a donation of $10 million worth of bonds. The interest mostly supports the Joseph Smith Papers project. We make up the difference that the interest doesn’t cover each year.

In the case of most scholarly historical books, you’re successful if you sell 1,500 over a lifetime. Our first volume sold more than 60,000 at a cost of $50 per book. The next volume, which was bigger and pricier, at $100, received more than 2,900 orders before it even came off the press. The books themselves are beautiful and the contents are mind-boggling. The researchers have found some fantastic stuff. They have discovered some things no one knew. The project has also included a companion TV series that airs on Sunday evenings. We have completed 40 of the 100 episodes we plan to produce.

Only a few days before I learned of the Joseph Smith Papers, I had been assigned to speak in a Sunday sacrament meeting and spent some time preparing my remarks. But en route to the chapel, I decided I wasn’t going to use the talk I had prepared; I decided I was going to talk about Joseph Smith, and I did. Afterward, I was approached by a woman who had sat in the congregation. She said, “I don’t live in this ward, but I felt I needed to go to a new ward today for some reason and wound up here. Your talk was for me.” I felt like I had been prepared for this project. I was in my office one time studying various things about Joseph Smith, and I felt he was there with me.

ARTICAL LINK: The Joseph Smith Papers and Larry H. Miller

Excerpt from Driven