’s copy of the Book of Commandments was used, along with several other source texts, by the editors of the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants as they were preparing JS’s revelations for publication in that volume. Cowdery and made editorial marks throughout this copy of the Book of Commandments, and it is possible that other unknown individuals also made marks. The editors marked and edited within this copy some of the revelations that were to be included in the new publication and then used this copy to set type for some portions of the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants.

Readers should consult the featured version of the Book of Commandments for an analysis of the printing of the Book of Commandments.

A brief explanation of each type of editing mark is provided here.

wrote “Covenants” in graphite at the head of sixteen revelations in his copy of the Book of Commandments, all of which appear in the first 21 sections of the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants. Various pages throughout the book are marked with a capital “S” in red grease pencil. All texts published in both the Book of Commandments and the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants bear this “S” mark in Cowdery’s Book of Commandments except chapter 28 and those chapters that correspond to sections 68 through 72 of the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants (chapters 57, 58, 61, 62, and 63). Though the precise meaning of the letter is unknown, this notation suggests a systematic survey of the contents of the volume to ensure that all the revelations in the Book of Commandments were included in the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants.

Several other editing marks were inscribed in ’s copy of the Book of Commandments. Editors added paragraph marks and numerals on many pages to denote versification for the 1835 publication. A bracket or parenthesis in Cowdery’s Book of Commandments at times corresponds to a line ending in the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants. To denote deletions, editors usually struck through words and phrases or marked them with an “X.” To denote additions, editors usually inserted individual words or phrases. When revisions were too lengthy or complex to indicate on the small pages of the Book of Commandments, editors sometimes referred the copyist or typesetter to some other source by marking passages with a caret or similar mark, which was sometimes accompanied by a notation such as “see” in the margin. In other cases where revisions were complex, editors circled passages that were to be ignored in the Book of Commandments in favor of some other source text. Thus, typesetters or copyists worked directly from the Book of Commandments until they reached a caret or a passage that had been circled, at which point they presumably turned to an additional source now no longer extant. Where a passage in the Book of Commandments referred to a person by first name or first name and initial, surnames were sometimes written in by hand and other times a caret was inscribed after the name, indicating that the copyist or typesetter should add the surname. The Cowdery copy of the Book of Commandments also contains three additional editing marks whose purpose is unknown.

The following table provides a comprehensive list of the editing marks found in the volume. The first column of the table lists the number of each chapter of the Book of Commandments. The second column provides the standard date for the item included in each chapter and a bracketed “D&C” reference to the section number in which the item appears in the 1981 (and 2013) Latter-day Saint edition of the Doctrine and Covenants. The third column identifies the editing marks found in each chapter of the Cowdery Book of Commandments. In this column, “Covenants” and “‘S’ mark” refer to the commonly appearing marks described above (in cases when “S” marks are found on pages other than the first page of a chapter, the numbers of those pages are identified in parentheses). The term “editing marks” as used in this column refers to all other types of editing marks made by editors, as described in the immediately preceding paragraph. The fourth column lists the number of the section in which each item was published in the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants.