E. B. Grandin

Egbert Bratt Grandin (March 30, 1806 – April 16, 1845) was a printer in Palmyra, New York, best known for publishing the first edition of the Book of Mormon, a sacred text of the churches of the Latter Day Saint movement.

Grandin was born in Freehold, Monmouth County, New Jersey, the youngest of ten children, and was reared on a farm near Palmyra, New York. At eighteen, he became an apprentice printer at the office of Palmyra's Wayne Sentinel, which he purchased in 1827. Besides publishing the newspaper, Grandin sold and bound books and operated a lending library. He married Harriet Rogers in 1828; they had six children, five of whom lived to adulthood. Grandin died at Palmyra.

Grandin first rejected the request of Joseph Smith to publish the Book of Mormon possibly "out of principle because he considered the book to be fraudulent and suspected that it would be a risky financial venture." Smith then sought a Rochester printer to do the job. "Realizing the work would proceed anyway, Grandin apparently overcame his scruples or his reservations and agreed to publish the work in Palmyra," requiring a $3000 security to print five thousand copies. "Fulfilling his wife's worst fears," Martin Harris, a well-to-do farmer and early believer in Smith's revelations, mortgaged his farm as security for the costly endeavor, effectively ending his marriage.

On June 26, 1829, the twenty-three-year-old Grandin announced in the Wayne Sentinel that he intended to publish the Book of Mormon "as soon as the translation is complete."Oliver Cowdery prepared a copy of the manuscript, and Grandin bought "500 pounds of new small pica" type in New York. The chief compositor, John H. Gilbert, found that the manuscript was "closely written and legible, but not a punctuation mark from beginning to end." Gilbert said that he added punctuation and capitalization in the evenings. Cowdery also set some type. To print the book, Grandin used a Smith Improved Printing Press invented by Peter Smith (1795–1823), which first appeared on the market about 1821 and was the most up-to-date press available to the small printer of the day.

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