The Book Collector Who Offered to Pay More

John Hajicek gives his girlfriend credit for this one. They went to Deseret Industries one evening in November 2019 looking for mid-century walnut furniture. She found a first edition of Mormon scripture in pristine condition. Hajicek identified it as the copy that had belonged to Junius F. Wells, founding editor of the nineteenth-century Mormon magazine The Contributor. The couple offered the thrift store more money for it.

“Of course, we bought the first edition, and the furniture,” Hajicek wrote the next day.

Years earlier, another man’s name in a book had sent the Hajicek family across a state line. John grew up above the family grocery in Minneapolis. His father, James, had studied theoretical physics, read seven languages and had lately taken up the Book of Mormon. At the Minneapolis Public Library he came across James J. Strang’s The Book of the Law of the Lord. It bore the rubber stamp of a man named Theron Drew and a mailing address in Burlington, Wisconsin.

In the summer of 1973, when John was nine, his parents visited Voree, the Mormon settlement near Burlington where believers had gathered under Strang after the death of Joseph Smith. His father returned in February 1978. The White River was frozen, and a hole had to be cut through the ice for his baptism. At sixteen, John went to live on Mormon Road among grandchildren of people who had known Joseph and Hyrum Smith. Years later he remembered how “we carried stacks of Joseph Smith-period books under our arms walking to church on Mormon Road.”

In 1982 Hajicek was driving a limousine for the Playboy Resort near Lake Geneva. That year he was ordained an elder in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and bought his first Book of Mormon printed during Joseph Smith’s lifetime. The Nauvoo text of 1840 and 1842 remains his favorite. Open it to the passage that generations of readers knew as “white and delightsome” and the word on the page is “pure.” Joseph Smith made that revision in 1840. Readers whose editions descended from an earlier printing could spend a lifetime with the book and never see it.

A dollar on the flyleaf

Hajicek moved to Independence, Missouri, in 1988 with a small Nissan and a trailer. Two years later he made Mormon history his full-time occupation. By 1992 he had put his own name on a Book of Mormon as publisher. It was a brown hardcover of 543 pages, translated into Hungarian by Steve Barany for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints at Voree. Hajicek himself did missionary work in Hungary, Slovakia and Romania. In Wisconsin he also edited the record kept by the scribes of Strang’s settlement. His edition of the Chronicles of Voree, 1844–1849 appears in the bibliography of the Joseph Smith Papers.

By 2018 Hajicek reckoned that roughly a hundred copies of the 1830 first edition had passed through his hands. That February he was in a hotel room in Lehi, Utah, bidding on another. Its front cover had been replaced. Hajicek studied the fifty auction photographs. In nearly four decades of collecting he had seldom seen such well-preserved paper inside an 1830 copy. There was a signature he wanted to examine and, on the first flyleaf, an old price in someone’s hand.

With ten seconds left, Hajicek bid $78,500. His rival went to $79,500. Hajicek had already authorized one last bid, and the auction system placed it for him. He bought the book for $80,000. The old notation on the flyleaf read “Price 1 dollar.”

Hajicek counts a million items in the collection he curates in Independence. The copy he chose to reproduce for other readers was the one he bought as a teenager. He and a friend had 2,000 copies photographically reprinted from his Nauvoo original. In July 2025 he reported that the family still had a handful.

“If anyone wants one, ask my daughters.”