Joseph Smith said he translated this book "by the gift and power of God" from a set of ancient metal plates, which he said he had recovered in 1827 near his family's farm outside Palmyra, New York, and returned afterward to the messenger who had shown them to him. Witnesses to the dictation describe him examining a seer stone — in later stretches of the work, a stone he placed in a hat to block out the light, rather than only the pair of stones bound to a breastplate that are traditionally called the Urim and Thummim and said to have come with the plates — and speaking the text aloud while a scribe wrote it down. Oliver Cowdery took down most of it this way over about two months in 1829, chiefly at the Whitmer family's farm in Fayette, New York; Martin Harris and Joseph's wife Emma Smith had served as scribes for shorter, earlier stretches.
The manuscript went to press within the year. Smith secured a copyright on the work in June 1829, and printing began at Egbert B. Grandin's shop in Palmyra, where the typesetter, John H. Gilbert, supplied the punctuation and paragraph breaks the dictated manuscript had not carried. The finished book appeared in March 1830: about 5,000 copies, Grandin's full run.
It is divided into fifteen books, from 1 Nephi to Moroni, each named for the prophetic record-keeper credited with compiling it. None of the 1830 copies had a single verse number — the text ran as continuous paragraphs under much longer chapters than readers see now. The chapter and verse divisions in use today date to an 1879 edition prepared by Orson Pratt, who also shortened the chapters and added the first footnotes. Later editions reworked its presentation further: a 1920 committee under George F. Richards set it in double columns and added chapter summaries and a pronunciation guide; a 1981 edition updated its cross-references, chapter headings and other reference material; and a 2013 printing corrected typographical inconsistencies that had crept into the plates used since 1981.
It stands as one of four volumes the Latter Day Saint movement calls its standard works, alongside the Bible, the [[DC|Doctrine and Covenants]] and the [[PGP|Pearl of Great Price]]. The text in this corpus comes from the Mormon Documentation Project's JSON export, which its maintainer has placed in the public domain; it carries the wording and versification of the current standard edition, with the 2013 printing's typographical corrections, and leaves out the footnotes, chapter summaries and introduction that remain under copyright. Because what is held here is that current standard text rather than any one historical printing, no single publication year is asserted for it.