It took a year and $15,000 to bring it back to life page by page.

This rare 1855 copy of the Book of Mormon in Hawaiian is now on display at Temple Visitors' Center in Laie.

Only the bare outlines of its history are known. Back in the early 1850's George Cannon, a teenage missionary from utah, came to the islands.

"But there was no Book of Mormon in Hawaiian that he could share with the Hawaiian people that he loved so much, and so he said, 'Well, we've got to get this translated,'" said Elder Jacobs of the Hawaii Temple Visitors Center.

Cannon convinced native Hawaiian Jonathan Napela to work on it with him and they completed the translation in two and a half years.

"Only 200 were bound and distributed and the other 2800 were lost in a fire in Honolulu in 1868," Jacobs said.

Only about a dozen of the 200 remaining books survived, this one because in 1920, it was given to N. Ford Clark, another missionary from Utah.

"He was a collector of books and I'm sure this was his most prized possession," Dean Clark Ellis, grandson of N. Ford Clark said.

When N. Ford Clark passed away in 1978, his copy was given to BYU and placed in a vault until recently, when the decision was made to have it professionally restored.

"It was completely disassembled, the binding, each page was taken out and soaked in a calcium bath to de-acify the paper and brought back to as close as original condition as possible and that's the book we have today," Dean Ellis said. "This is where it belongs. This is where my grandfather wanted it to be, where my parents wanted it to be, and I'm glad now instead of being in a vault that it's on display."

You can see "Ka Buke A Moramona" at the Visitors Center near the temple. It's open every day.

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