Fence Sitter wrote: ↑Tue Jan 20, 2026 10:47 pm
That footnote led me to a fascinating 2021 paper by Sonia Hazard, in which she argues that Smith may have, in fact, created such a prop, supporting her claim with a range of circumstantial evidence. Hazard demonstrates that eyewitness descriptions of the gold plates—their size, weight, metallic appearance, right-to-left orientation, engraved or raised characters, binding with rings, and page-like format—closely resemble known printing plates used in early nineteenth-century American print culture.
Another interesting passage in Hazard’s paper quotes Joseph Smith Sr.:
One eyewitness claimed to have viewed images on the metal plates themselves (and not just a paper facsimile, as did Turner’s informant and Anthon). This was Joseph Smith Sr., Smith’s father and one of the Eight Witnesses, who said he recognized Masonic images on the plates. (The senior Smith was a Mason.) The second plate in the box, he attested, was decorated with “representations of all the Masonic implements, as used by masons at the present day.”
This passage is interesting on two counts. First, if the quote is to be believed, the description of plates stored in a box closely matches how stereotyped clichés were commonly stored. Second, it highlights an obvious anachronism: the presence of Masonic symbols on plates purportedly created in 600 AD or earlier—well before Freemasonry existed.
Thank you for sharing this, FS. An interesting addition to Joseph Smith Sr’s description is captured in the paper here:
which would also explain Anthon’s stars, moons, and crosses, all of which featured in Masonic symbology.
The following is a great question too—I think Vogel has put forth an idea about tin plates, but printing plates seem a much better fit:
Why has the simplest answer to the mystery of the plates that Smith had access to material plates rarely been considered by critical historical scholarship?
I had not seen this account from Pratt before—from the paper:
Orson Pratt, who was close to Joseph Smith but not a physical witness to the plates, announced in two sermons that witnesses had testified to seeing a black residue applied to the letters. In one sermon, recorded in published proceedings, Pratt noted that the letterforms were stained with a black, hard stain, so as to make the letters more legible and easier to be read. In a different sermon, published as reminiscences by a congregant, Pratt reportedly described how the engravings were filled with black l cement, evocative of recessed intaglio characters rather than the raised relief surface of stereotype plates. In both accounts, the mysterious black substance invites comparison to standard printing ink. If stereotype plates had not been cleaned thoroughly, a patina of ink would have remained on the raised letterforms. An inky residue would have been embedded in the fine grooves of even a cleaned copper plate
That’s second hand, but I wonder why Orson would even mention it?
Another interesting point:
Smith’s aside about the location of the title page is worth underlining. It was the very last leaf on the left hand side of the collection or book of plates. At first blush, Smith appears inconsistent, for he said the title page was located on the left indicating that one would read the plates, as in a Western book, from left to right while at the same time, the plates individually read from right to left, in the manner of languages such as Hebrew. This would be incongruous in virtually all situations except for printing plate storage. In the boxes of stereotype plates, preserved in their original nineteenth-century storage boxes, at the Library Company (figure 3), the plates are organized with the lower page numbers at the left. In the first box, the title page plate may be found as the last plate on the far left side of the box precisely in the position Smith described. The printing-plates hypothesis comes into view because of the buildup of particulars like these, not owing to any smoking gun.
Agreed, although I’m not sure how many grains of sand it would take to come to a heaping conclusion. I agree with the following also:
Overall, early Mormon sources require interpreters to proceed with caution and not to take any one document as proof positive for the existence of the plates or for a list of their exact characteristics. It is only when collected together that the converging textual evidence increasingly comes to resemble a description of a set of printing plates.
I’m not sure why the account below is considered “fact”—the paper goes on to say that Joseph didn’t report seeing plates until 1832. Joseph could have acquired copper printing plates anytime between 1823 and 1827, he simply never said anything about their acquisition until much later.
Recall that Smith reported first seeing the plates in 1823, but he was only able to recover them in 1827. One possibility is that Smith encountered printing plates in 1823 or earlier, feasibly in a local printing shop, inspiring his 1823 vision. A second option is that Smith’s familiarity with the Hebrew Bible stimulated his 1823 notion of the plates, and only later, in the interval between 1823 and 1827, did Smith encounter material plates that gave concrete shape to his prior ideation. Third and finally, it could be that Smith really found material plates on the hill, just as he said he did, conceivably glimpsing them in 1823 and retrieving them in 1827.
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Let us take a closer look at Smith s 1823 vision. Though there are no real-time sources for this event, there are post hoc accounts recorded by Smith beginning in 1832. His most complete account, from 1839, described what happened…
