When the first 116 pages of the translation of Mormon’s record were lost, it was decided to make a backup copy for the printer so there was less of a chance that such a disaster would happen again. This second manuscript, known as the printer’s manuscript, has the full text of the Book of Mormon, where the original manuscript has had over half of its pages lost or damaged.
The printer’s manuscript was copied from the original in the way the original was given. That is, it was a dictation that was written down as quickly as possible by the various scribes. There was no indication of sentences or paragraphs. There were indications of where chapters began, and indications of the beginnings of new books, but other than that, punctuation was rare.
When the manuscript was presented for publication, the compositor at the Grandin Press was John Gilbert, and it fell to him to discern how to break the nearly continuous text into sentences and paragraphs. He did a remarkable job, and made few obvious errors. One of those errors was when he punctuated the header for the book of Alma. Now, the last sentence reads “according to the record of Alma, the first and chief judge.” Gilbert originally had the comma in a different place. Knowing that Alma was a ruler, he wrote “Alma the first, and chief judge.”
Because the text was continuous, there was no indication on the printer’s manuscript of where the header should be separated from the text proper. Again, he did a remarkable job. However, in the case of 2 Nephi 6:1, he formatted this sentence as part of the text, and it should have been a chapter header. Mormon will later use chapter headings when he uses a different source, and that is what we have in this section. Nephi is copying a text from his brother, Jacob.
This was the first time that Gilbert had seen a header for a chapter, and he missed this. During Grant Hardy’s work in reparagraphing the Book of Mormon for a study edition, he recognized that this should be separated as a header.