E-catalogue 60: The Word (writ small)

E-catalogue 60: The Word (writ small)

Since the advent of printing from movable type in the western world, the Bible has never been out-of-print. In its nearly six-century print run, this foundational text has taken many forms, the smallest of which have long been a focus of ours. In fact, the recent acquisition of a trio of important eighteenth-century thumb Bibles served as the impetus behind this list: joining the first illustrated edition of John Taylor’s Verbum Sempiternum and two fugitive derivative editions of John Harris’s History of the Bible is a wide-ranging group of items that spans the centuries: from a tiny Lord’s Prayer in a silver locket, to a French devotional for children in an elaborate contemporary red morocco binding. Their diminutive size makes miniature books more personal, and therefore, more our own, and there is no better example of this than the thumb Bible carried by a young soldier through the American Civil War, which can be found here.