Among the many features of the Book of Mormon that is continually overlooked by commentators is its fundamental orality: it is the product of dictation. Joseph Smith said that he was not composing but translating, from an ancient language inscribed on divinely-revealed golden plates, and readers have varying beliefs about the text's underlying ancient origins. Because Smith also said that the plates were reclaimed by heaven at the end of his work, though, in practical terms the earliest text is the same for all alike – it is that which passed from Smith's lips to the ears and pens of various scribes in the spring and early summer of 1829. Routinely characterised as repetitive and boring, readers would do better to hear the Book of Mormon for what it is – a long, mostly sad story, told aloud. Royal Skousen has spent more than twenty years trying to get at that story told aloud, and it is hard to imagine coming closer than his ‘earliest text’. This book is the tenth to result from Skousen's Critical Text Project, and will stand as the distillation of its scholarly contribution. The Book of Mormon has a complex transmission history which belies its origins in the era of print, and Skousen has compared two extant sets of manuscripts and twenty significant printed editions to reconstruct the most likely original text. This volume contains a preface and an appendix outlining his methods and this text's most significant deviations from the commonly received version, but for a full explanation of these matters readers are directed to volume four of the Project's publications, the six-book Analysis of textual variants of the Book of Mormon (2004–9). Equal in importance to the text's composition is the way in which it is presented. The Book of Mormon's conventional punctuation and versification have little or nothing to do with the original text – Joseph Smith gave out only, as Jan Shipps has written, ‘words filling page after page after page with unpunctuated prose’ (Mormonism, Illinois 1985, 25); subsequent formatting was the work of editors and printers, often no more considered than the snap judgement of a typesetter at work. Skousen strips the text of this formatting and presents it in ‘sense-lines’, breaking what have been read as paragraphs of repetitive narrative into the phrases and clauses of something resembling epic poetry. He is careful to avoid any claim that these breaks represent Smith's actual dictation pauses, but believes that ‘the first verbalization of the text would have sounded something like the result of reading the sense-lines out loud’ (p. xliii). In this presentation, the text's infamous tics take on a decidedly literary rhythm – its comically frequent ‘And it came to pass’ clauses, for example, become a drum-beat of portent. The result of Skousen's labours is a work of unique aesthetic and scholarly value, and an essential resource for scholarly approaches to the Book of Mormon.