“The Book of the Law of the Lord” is a large, leather-bound blank book made with thick paper. The paper bears a star-shaped watermark in the middle of each leaf and was printed with forty-seven blue lines on each side. The text block was originally formed with thirty gatherings of eight leaves each. The second gathering, however, has only six leaves. This six-leaf gathering was the result of either a binding error or one sheet coming loose from the binding before the book was inscribed (the book’s inscription and pagination run through this gathering without any missing text or skipped page numbers). The gatherings were sewn all along. Each set of endpapers consisted of a gathering of four leaves of unlined paper, but only two leaves are now extant in the back gathering. The trimmed pages measure 16¼ × 10½ inches (41 × 27 cm). Headbands were sewn onto the text block. The exterior pages of the endpapers are joined to the pasteboards with strips of pink cloth. Marbled papers featuring a shell pattern with green body and veins of red and yellow are glued to the inside covers of the boards and to the exterior page of each gathering of endpapers. The leaf edges are stained green. The text block is bound in ledger style to the boards. The spine was constructed with four false raised bands demarcating five panels. The boards and spine are covered in suede with additional leather strips that cover the top and bottom of the book, including the first and fifth panels of the spine. The suede was blind tooled on the outside covers, the raised bands of the spine, and the turned-in edges on the inside cover. The additional leather strips are embossed with dual lines and vegetal designs along the borders and have gold line filling. The spine is further embossed with the number “6” in twenty-point type on the fifth panel. The second and fourth panels have black-painted squares of paper glued to them. These feature gold lining and decoration at the top and bottom. The completed volume measures 17 × 11 × 2¼ inches (43 × 28 × 6 cm) and includes 244 free leaves. A penciled inscription at the inside top corner of page [ii]—the verso of the front marbled flyleaf—gives what appears to be an expensive price for this high-quality blank book: “bth | 10.00”.

inscribed nine revelations in the book on the first twenty-three pages of lined paper. made minor revisions to these revelation texts. Apparently either Richards or Thompson inscribed page numbers on pages 3–18, beginning at the first page of lined paper, in a stylized script. Richards inscribed page numbers on pages 19–25 as well as on the next several dozen pages. At some point, page [1], the recto of the last leaf of unlined endpaper in the front of the book, was inscribed with a title: “THE | BOOK | of the | LAW | of the | LORD”. Because these words are hand lettered in various ornate styles, the handwriting cannot be identified. A matching title appears on the spine of the volume: the square of black paper on the second panel of the spine bears a smaller rectangular label of white paper with a hand-lettered inscription: “LAW | — of the — | LORD.” Revelations were inscribed only on the first twenty-five pages of the volume, except in a couple of instances where they were copied into journal entries that were later inscribed in the volume. The bulk of the volume comprises records of donations in cash and in kind for the construction of the . Journal entries for JS are inscribed on intermittent pages from 26 to 215. Willard Richards inscribed pages 26–126 of the book, with help from on pages 27–28 and 72–87. Clayton inscribed the rest of the volume, pages 127–477, with help from on pages 168–171 and from on pages 189–190 and 192–201. These clerks and scribes generally paginated the book and inscribed dateline page headers along the way as they inscribed its texts.

The “Law of the Lord” is listed as such in inventories of church records made in Salt Lake City in the 1850s. These show that the volume reposed for a time in the office of church president . At some point, the book was marked on the spine with an archival sticker, which was later removed. The book eventually was housed with the papers of Joseph Fielding Smith, apparently during his tenure as church historian and recorder (1921–1970), and then became part of the First Presidency’s papers when he became church president in 1970. In 2010 the First Presidency gave custody of the book to the Church History Library.