Brattleboro’ Editions
This 1834 Bible was printed in Brattleborough, Vermont, a town name that was often abbreviated as Brattleboro’ with an apostrophe, as it is on this title page. Bible publishing began there just after the early death of a printer and newspaper publisher, Daniel Fessenden, in 1815. His father-in-law, John Holworth, took over Fessenden’s firm, even though he knew nothing about printing. Holworth immediately decided to publish a Bible—a difficult venture in such a remote location. His first Bible appeared the next year, in 1816. Over the next three and a half decades, he produced 42 Bible editions.
This particular Bible is an example of a strange mainstay of nineteenth-century American publishing, the English-only polyglot Bible. Despite the fact that “polyglot” means “in many tongues,” the word had such appeal that publishers produced more than a hundred all-English polyglots from 1831 to 1871. Their rationale was that the Bibles used the English plates from a true polyglot Bible—an eight-language edition issued by British publisher Samuel Bagster in 1822.
Brattleboro’ Bibles were known for their illustrations, and this one is no exception, with ample engravings and woodcuts. The tightly packed title page lists an extraordinary number of other aids to the reader, including three sermons, a gazetteer, a concordance, various tables, an interpretative essay, introductions to the Bible and each book of the Bible, “parallel and illustrative passages,” marginal notes, and, of course, “a neatly engraved family record.”
The English Version of the Polyglott Bible. Brattleboro': Fessenden & Co. and Peck & Wood, 1834. Library of Congress.
