Tithing and donations for December 1841–May 1844 were inscribed in a large, leather-bound blank book made with thick paper. The paper bears a star-shaped watermark in the middle of each leaf and was printed with forty-seven blue lines on each side. The text block was originally formed with thirty gatherings of eight leaves each. The second gathering, however, has only six leaves. Each set of front and back endpapers consists of a gathering of four leaves of unlined paper, but only two leaves are now extant in the back gathering. The trimmed pages measure 16¼ × 10½ inches (41 × 27 cm). Headbands were sewn onto the text block. The exterior pages of the endpapers are joined to the pasteboards with a strip of pink cloth. Marbled papers featuring a shell pattern with green body and veins of red and yellow are glued to the inside covers of the boards and to the exterior page of each gathering of endpapers. The leaf edges are stained green. The text block is bound in a ledger style to the boards. The spine was constructed with four false raised bands demarcating five panels. The boards and spine are covered in suede leather with additional leather strips over the top and bottom of the book. The suede leather was blind tooled on the outside covers, the raised bands of the spine, and the turned-in edges on the inside cover. The additional leather strips, which also cover the first and fifth panels of the spine, are embossed with dual lines and vegetal designs along the borders and have gold line filling. The spine is further embossed with the number “6” in 20-point type on the fifth panel. The second and fourth panels have black-painted squares of paper glued to them. These feature gold lining and decoration at the top and bottom. The completed volume measures 17 × 11 × 2¼ inches (43 × 28 × 6 cm) and includes 244 free leaves. A penciled inscription at the inside top corner of page [ii]—the verso of the front marbled flyleaf—gives what appears to be an expensive price for this high-quality blank book: “bth | 10.00”.

inscribed nine revelations in the book on the first twenty-three pages of lined paper. made minor revisions to these revelation texts. At some point page [1], the recto of the last leaf of unlined endpaper in the front of the book, was inscribed with a title: “THE | BOOK | of the | LAW | of the | LORD”. Because these words are hand lettered in various ornate styles, the handwriting cannot be identified. A matching title appears on the spine of the volume: the square label of black paper on the second panel of the spine bears a smaller square label of white paper with a hand-lettered inscription: “LAW | — of the — | LORD.” inscribed pages 26–126 of the book, with help from and on page 27, and on pages 72–87. inscribed the rest of the volume, pages 127–477, with help from on pages 168–171, on pages 189–190 and 192–201, John McEwan on pages 219–231, and on pages 313–343. These clerks and scribes generally paginated the book and inscribed dateline page headers along the way as they inscribed its texts. At various stages in the production of the volume, and signed their names to their work (pages 126, 181, 215).

Journal entries comprise 90 pages of the volume. The donation records constitute the majority of the volume, 387 pages.

Notes written on three white and three blue slips of paper of various sizes have been inserted in various places, as has a clipped portion of a -era elder’s certificate form with no notes (apparently just a placeholder). There are also two leaves of pink paper just inside the front of the volume. All of these slips and leaves of paper are loose and appear to have been added to the book at a later time.

The book is intricately related to its successor volume, the donation record, which the Joseph Smith Papers has titled “Book of the Law of the Lord, Book B,” and contains donations from May 1844–January 1846, as well as a volume that indexed the tithing and donation records. The “Law of the Lord” is listed as such in inventories of church records made in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the 1850s. These show that the volume was held for a time in the office of church president . In 1880, , president of the , carried the book to a stake Relief Society conference in Salt Lake City. At some point the book was marked on the spine with an archival sticker, which was later removed. The book eventually was housed with the papers of Joseph Fielding Smith, apparently during his tenure as church historian and recorder (1921–1970), and then became part of the First Presidency’s papers when he became church president in 1970. In 2010, the First Presidency gave custody of the book to the Church History Library. This evidence indicates continuous institutional custody and authenticity.