One Book, Many Forms: Transcript

Includes Steven Galbraith, co-curator of the Folger Manifold Greatness exhibition and Andrew W. Mellon curator of books at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and Hannibal Hamlin, co-curator of the Folger Manifold Greatness exhibition and associate professor of English at The Ohio State University. 

HANNIBAL HAMLIN: Even early on, with the printing of the King James Bible, there are different formats for different uses.

STEVEN GALBRAITH: The 1611 is a large book. It’s not something that you carry with you. It’s not something you read in bed. The first two editions are folios, but almost immediately, Barker starts printing smaller format editions.

HAMLIN: Desk size, sort of medium-size, formats, and even in much smaller pocket sizes. These printers, some of them may have had religious motivations for what they did, but they were also trying to make a good business going, and they were trying to cater to as many different markets as they could, producing Bibles that people would buy.

GALBRAITH: They're less expensive for book buyers. They're easier to carry around. Those become the editions that everyday people might have in their homes.

HAMLIN: Families would often have a family Bible, a sort of large format Bible and these Bibles, most of them had blank pages here and there, and on those pages, it became common to include family information, sometimes births and deaths and marriages.

GALBRAITH: We have editions that were given as gifts. We have one that's a gift from a father to his daughter, perhaps even on her eighteenth birthday. We have editions that are bound in beautiful embroidered binding.

In our exhibition, we have some that are bound in the dos-à-dos style, or the back-to-back. In that case, it’s two books bound together, sharing the same backboard. You open one side, you might get part of the Old Testament. You flip it over and you open the other side, you might get the New Testament.

Perhaps the most exciting piece in our exhibition is a copy of the 1611 King James Bible that was bound for Prince Henry, that’s James I's son. We know it was bound for him because his crest is stamped in the center in a style that he had used on many of his books.

When I look at a book like the copy of the King James Bible that was owned by Justinian Isham and he inscribes in the front of it, "This is the book that I took overseas," it not only carries with it the text of the Bible, it carries with it the story of this young man. Books, just like any historical artifact, have the capacity to tell a story outside their own pages, if you just take the time to examine it and listen to it.

HAMLIN: One of the most popular illustrated Bibles in nineteenth-century America was Harper's Illuminated Bible that was originally published in serial format. People snapped it up the way they would chapters of a Dickens novel, and then eventually bound these together. And it contained more and greater and better illustrations than any Bible previously.

The R. Crumb Bible is one of the latest forays in a long ancient tradition of Bible illumination and illustration. R. Crumb, who was a famous counterculture figure in the 1960s, decided to take on the project of a kind of cartoon or graphic novel version of the Book of Genesis. The figures you see in it are still definitely R. Crumb figures, but it’s a serious attempt to represent the Bible in a different medium.

We’re still seeing the King James Version, not just in the traditional book format, but the King James Bible is one of the top sellers in electronic formats as well. I think it sells as well as any other version in almost any format you could choose.