Remembering “A Key for Evaluating Nephite Geographies”

From its birth back in the Bad Old Days of FARMS, when I was invited by Jack Welch to launch it, I was determined that the Review of Books on the Book of Mormon, as it was first known — it would later become the FARMS Review of Books and then simply the FARMS Review, though its very last title was actually Mormon Studies Review (under which title it’s effectively been, to borrow an old Latin American political term, “disappeared”)* — would be worthy of reading for itself, and not merely as a pointer to (or a warning against) other materials.

My point of comparison was Penguin CD guides.  Going into a music store, I would find a Penguin guide to recordings, glance quickly through it, choose the best version of, say, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, put the guide back on the shelf, and proceed to buy the recording that I’d chosen.  It never occurred to me to buy the guide itself.  And, I reasoned, if the Review was only useful as a quick reference guide to current publications, nobody would ever want to read it, either.

I was very pleased, accordingly, when, in our very first issue of ROBOTBOM (as I unofficially called it), Professor John Clark contributed a very useful piece, of enduring relevance beyond the book it was reviewing.  It was called “A Key for Evaluating Nephite Geographies.”  He hadn’t wanted to write it, but I persuaded him to do so anyway, arguing that all we really needed from him was a short little book review.  Piece of cake.  Under that stipulation, he accepted — and then proceeded, much to my delighted surprise, to turn in a remarkably lucid illustrated essay of fifty-one printed pages.

Looking just now in the section of the New Maxwell Institute’s website reserved for fossils from the ancien régime, I found it with a bit of difficulty — though, unfortunately, Professor Clark’s very useful illustrations seem to have vanished.

Fortunately, in what turned out to be our very last issue of the journal, we published Dr. Clark’s “Revisiting ‘A Key for Evaluating Nephite Geographies,'” which includes modified versions of the original artwork:

http://publications.maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/review/23/1/S00003-51769f6bd4b5e3Clark.pdf

Posted from Bountiful, Utah

*  The very last issue of the journal that I edited (with the help of Louis Midgley, George Mitton, and Gregory Smith) was renamed as Mormon Studies Review but, despite the name change, was numbered continuously with the very first issue of the Review of Books on the Book of Mormon as 23/1.  When we were purged as editors, though, and after a suitably long period of detoxification, the next issue of the Mormon Studies Review, under new editorial leadership and moving in a very different direction, was identified as Mormon Studies Review 1.  This had the interesting effect, perhaps unintentional, of rendering Mormon Studies Review 23/1 more or less invisible, practically speaking.  A search for the Mormon Studies Review may miss it, a search for it under the name of FARMS Review could easily miss it, and a reader who sees a reference to a piece in Mormon Studies Review 23/1 may well find the reference very puzzling.  (After all, the Maxwell Institute’s Mormon Studies Review has only published two issues, thus far, right?  It published MSR 1 in 2014) and MSR 2 in 2015.  There’s just no room for an MSR 23/1, published in 2011!)   Too bad for those who contributed to that last issue and those who edited it, I suppose.  Down the memory hole, and good riddance!