1851 First Edition "Pearl of Great Price"
GUEST:
This is a first edition of The Pearl of Great Price. It was printed in Liverpool, England, in 1851. I had a great-great-grandfather who had joined the church in England in 1840. And I think that this must have been one of his possessions. My grandfather came to America in 1884.
APPRAISER:
Okay.
GUEST:
And brought this with him.
APPRAISER:
Well, as you pointed out, this is the Liverpool edition of The Pearl of Great Price.
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
Published, uh, by the British mission in 1851. This was the third volume of Mormon scripture. Joseph Smith had published The Book of Mormon in 1830, followed by The Doctrine and Covenants in 1835, and this volume wasn't published until after his death. The signature on the inside board here, of Joseph Smith, isn't that of the author and translator of The Pearl of Great Price, because Joseph Smith was martyred, uh, in 1844.
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
And this book wasn't, uh, published until 1851. The second edition of this book wasn't published until 1878, one year after Brigham Young's death. So this is an early volume of LDS scripture. These salmon wraps here are original. This is the half-title. And the title page with the '51 date. And then I'm gonna turn the book all the way over. It's, uh, in these crudely printed homemade wrappers.
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
But what they've done, all these years, is protect this salmon wrapper on the back that lists other current books and their prices of the day. And that's what makes this copy extremely unusual. Pearls of Great Prices aren't all that unusual. But copies in these original wrappers are almost unheard of. And that, coupled with one other thing that I'll show you here, this has the facsimile from the Book of Abraham, the foldout plate.
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
There are three of them in here, but... This plate, because of the foldout nature of the plate...
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
Are almost always missing from the book. So it's very, very unusual that this, this page is still intact in the book. Ordinary copies sell for perhaps $7,500 to $10,000. But your copy would fetch somewhere between $45,000 to $55,000.
GUEST (softly): Oh.
APPRAISER:
Did you have any idea it was worth that much money?
GUEST:
No, I didn't.
APPRAISER:
I've only ever had a Pearl of Great Price in wrappers once before in my entire career of 35 years.
GUEST:
Oh!
Appraisal Details
Executive producer Marsha Bemko shares her tips for getting the most out of ANTIQUES ROADSHOW.
Value can change: The value of an item is dependent upon many things, including the condition of the object itself, trends in the market for that kind of object, and the location where the item will be sold. These are just some of the reasons why the answer to the question "What's it worth?" is so often "It depends."
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