Latter-day Saint Life

The Remarkable Story Behind the Book of Mormon in the Harvard Library

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After a long day of working in Harvard's library, an LDS student decided to see what books the school had about his religion. What he found was a long forgotten treasure that is simply incredible.

The following is a story Paul Alan Cox shared with the Deseret News.

In 1978 when I was studying for my doctorate, I spent a lot of time in Widener Library searching obscure literature on tropical rain forest ecology. The Widener Library, which is at Harvard, is second in America only to the Library of Congress in terms of number of volumes, and is a wonderful resource for scholarly studies.

After a long day of working in the library, I decided to take a break to see if they had any books about my church. The librarian at the reference desk kindly gave me the call numbers. I went up the elevator and into the shelves. I was amazed by the number of books, both pro and con, on the shelves about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A small dusty volume on an upper shelf caught my eye, and I pulled it down.

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