Printing the Book: Transcript

Steven Galbraith is a co-curator of the Folger Manifold Greatness exhibition and Andrew W. Mellon curator of books at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

STEVEN GALBRAITH: The three main people that worked at a print shop were the compositor, and that’s the person who set the type, and then two pressmen, one who would apply the ink, and another who would put the paper onto the tympan and pull the handle once everything was set and ready to go.

Printing the King James Bible is expensive and it falls on the printer who’s going to do it. The printer here is Robert Barker. He has the royal patent on printing Bibles. That does not mean that he gets the money paid for by the court. He has to raise that money. Paper is the most expensive part of printing during this period. Labor is pretty cheap. Ink is cheap. But paper, usually imported from the continent, is expensive.

Working in an early modern printing house was hard work. Days were long and the labor was hard. We know that various instruments used in the process were cleaned by urine, so we know that it smelled. It probably wasn’t the nicest job to have.

Well, the compositor is working off of, probably, a manuscript of the text, reading the manuscript while pulling type from the case. And they knew the layout of the case by heart. So it was a very mechanical exercise. And if the type wasn’t set back into the case properly, it could make for some errors. So, during the printing process, they would pull a proof and that would be given to the corrector. And the corrector would then go through and mark what needs to be changed in the page. That doesn’t mean that the pressmen stopped. They kept going. That’s why so many different typographical variants are introduced into early modern printing.

In a folio edition from 1613, "Jesus" at one point is mistakenly printed as "Judas." And, it’s become known as the Judas Bible. In our copy, someone has corrected this mistake. And what they did is, they just pasted the name "Jesus" over "Judas."

[Points to corrected error on page]

But you can still see a bit of the J from "Judas" sneaking around the side of the paste-down correction.

The most infamous typo found in the King James Bible is from an edition now called the Wicked Bible, because in the Ten Commandments, it reads, "Thou shalt commit adultery." King Charles wasn’t exactly thrilled about this and fines the printer, Robert Barker, two hundred pounds. But very few of those books survive. Getting a Wicked Bible, even for this exhibition, is proving to be a fairly wicked endeavor.

It’s been said that Barker was ruined by printing the King James Bible. And towards the end of his life, he’s still in financial trouble. He ends up running his print shop from debtors' prison. But when you look at those years of his career, there’s still a lot of output coming from his print shop. So it doesn’t seem to be hindering him too badly.

We’re not sure exactly how many copies of the King James Bible were printed. We think between five hundred and a thousand, which is probably the print run of a book this size. We’re also not sure how long it took Barker to complete that print run. We think he’s raising money in October of 1610, and we know that the book has an imprint date of 1611. So we guess that somewhere in that year, probably a little over a year, he completed the print run.