I should have thought of this as soon as I heard about Joseph Smith and his golden plates and I'm not sure if anyone has ever mentioned it here but...
simply put:
Consider the amount of text in the BoM. Consider, if engraved up plates of gold the thickness each plate would have to be in order for the engravings on the other side not to protude causing eligibility to the already unfamiliar characters (Braille books are often impossible to read by sight alone if embossed on both sides because of too many dots!!) and being thicker than paper, engraved upon (without machinery engraved text isn't all that teenytiny. Engraving text is timely business too especially if done by hand), how were the plates not absolutely huge and ridiculously heavy?? Unless a single "reformed Egyptian" character constituted a whole sentence, or larger body of text than a single word, they could not possibly contain the entirety of the book that JS claimed to translate. In fact the plates depicted in paintings would likely only realistically contain just one of the books of Nephi!
Even at the size they are depicted at. Joseph smith managed to carrying them and keep them on his desk?? Did he have super human strength too?

I wonder why this didn't occur to me earlier!
Am I just on a "I just resigned" insomniac exmo-roll of excitement, or does anybody share my opinion?

For a book as lengthy and boring as the BoM, I think the plates should have been the size of my fridge and each one an inch thick.

And, of course, one has to wonder about the "sealed portion": if the BoM contains the *fullness* of the gospel, then what the hell is in the Big Fat Sealed Portion!? Recipes for Curelom stew?

It's supposed to be a history of the Jews that will be revealed in the "Lord's own time" if I'm not mistaken, but wait a minute, don't we have a history of the Jews? You know....the, uhhhh....Bible?? Not to mention lots of archeology and historical references from other nations.

Oof....

Yummm...I haven't had a good curelom stew in a long time!

I would travel half way around the world for a dish of good curelom stew. Where do find it?

A nice pile of nees is the perfect accompaniment.

The last time it was offered around these parts was at Ol' Swingin' Joe's Kirtland Cafe (also with locations in Nauvoo, IL, and Palmyra, NY). Other fantastic fare at the Cafe included the ever-popular Tapir & Taproot Tempura.

Be sure to tell 'em that Fanny Alger sent ya! And have a Pay Lay Ale on the house! (TBM Tithe is 10% off during happy hour)

Y'all come back now, ya hear!?

:)

"I would travel half way around the world for a dish of good curelom stew. Where do find it?"

I've heard that the best curelom stew is either in Central America or western New York State, but which one is the best is in dispute.

The size and heaviness concerns me the most.

How could he even carry it?? It should have weighed 90kilos or more!

http://www.mormonthink.com/runningweb.htm

You may find this interesting. Actually, this site has a ton of information on it that you may interested in.

Interesting link! Thank you!

Engraving is an art form. Had golden plates existed (we only have the word of a proven con man and his cronies), they would have taken advantage of gold's extreme malleability. If I'd been one of Freiburg's buff ancient injun Jews, I would have hammered that metal real thin.

But what does it matter? Joseph didn't even look at the plates to translate them. He looked on a seer stone in a hat, as acknowledged by TSCC and its historians. Personally, I think Oliver and Joseph were in on the ruse. All they had to do was fool Emma, and the grapevine would do the rest.

If a TBM starts telling you about the gold plates you can say, "Wow good thing they weren't made of lead or he could have never carried them.", when they agree, you can tell them gold is more dense than lead so of course he couldn't carry around all that text, plus weren't some translated pages lost forever?

Joseph Smith describes fighting off assailants while running with the gold plates:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_lQUnNKsuM

Remember the breaks between pictures at a theater, where they would show a 10 min. action film with a cliff-hanging ending, so you had to return to see how the character got him or her self out of the impossible danger in which he/she was left?

Maybe ol' Joe intended to "translate" another work at some future time, if the first worked out.

Running through the woods carrying a 40-50 lb. book to transcribe? Didn't happen.

My mom was a YW president, when I was a teenage boy and I ended up helping her with lots of activities and knew most of the girls.
My dad, very crafty and handy with tools, built a replica of the golden plates at my mom’s request, for some kind of program she was doing.

He made them the size of a large book, with separate pages, just 10 or 12 made out of plywood, which he painted gold and hooked together so the pages turned.

He also made a base to display them with rope coiled up to look like a beehive. It may not have been accurate as described but it was very well received by ward members and others.

When the program was over, they left it in a supply closet at church that had things the YW used. IIRC, they stayed in the closet for a while, maybe several months. One day, she came home upset that their Beehive/Golden plates was gone from the closet. She asked around and I sure wish I remembered the details, but she discovered that someone (SP or High Council?) didn’t think the display was accurate as to what the plates really looked like so she wasn’t to use them on display. They had taken them away and she wasn't going to get them back. I think we knew who had them, a guy in our stake who had a big collection of pioneer and early morg stuff that he displayed in a museum and in his yard in Sandy.

Mom would have never made a fuss but she did say that she wondered how they knew the depiction was incorrect since no one had really seen them. That was last I ever heard of them. Always wondered where it ended up.

Proof that did not exist. JS was a dirt poor "farmer" con artist. A seeker of buried treasures. If JS had truly found a book made of gold, he would have sold it as quickly as possible. Why did Martin Harris put up money for the publishing of the BOM? Could they have not gotten the money need by selling a page of the BOM? How about the pages JS "translated" the 116 pages from. It was not need after it was"lost / burned" So why not sell that portion. Why not snip around the edges of the pages and sell that? He / They had 100+ pounds of gold and no tried to sell it? .No one talked to JS about selling it? The whole history / story is told all about the golden book from a literary / religious viewpoint. Restoring the gospel. A prophet. It was a crap load of gold! A crap load of money! and no one ever mentions it that way. Why? simple, they all were in on the scam. They all new there was no gold book. Someone comes to me and says; I need about $3000 or so to publish this book I translated from these plates of gold. What?!.

Gold was about $20oz in 1830 ( from what I can find) so for 100lb of gold, that's like $32,000, which would be about $843,000.00 today.