Did you know the University of Manitoba has a first edition copy of the King James Bible? If you know where to go and who to talk to, you can arrange for a one-on-one tour. You can even stroke the pages of this 400-year-old book, if you so desire.
Until April 2012 the Elizabeth Dafoe Library will have their first edition King James Bible, along with a variety of other rare texts, on display for the public. The exhibition opened in October.
There is a lot more to the Dafoe Library than first meets the eye. The smell of Starbucks coffee begins to waft through the hustle and bustle of the first floor at around nine o’clock every morning. Up one flight of stairs, there is an entire floor of desks covered in a thick blanket of silence. Finally, up one more flight of stairs, you will find the Icelandic Reading Room — a gem of this university, which needs an article of its very own to describe its serene perfection. A few metres away you will find the Department of Archives and Special Collections, which houses most of the rare books the University of Manitoba has in its possession.
In an interview with the Manitoban, both Shelley Sweeney, the head of Archives and Special Collections, and David Watt, a medieval literature professor here at the U of M, spoke about the history of this famous text, and why it was (and is) so important to so many different people.
The first thing you notice when you lay your eyes on the first edition of the KJB is its size: it is humongous. This was not a book designed to be carried around in a knapsack. It has the dimensions — and probably the weight — of a small boulder.
“The size of the bibles had to do, to some extent, with control. Who was reading them, and what they were doing with them,” says Watt, when asked about the sheer bulk of this King James Bible.
Some of the bibles around during this period in history were smaller, portable and illegal. The King James Bible, however, was not a book for the bus, and it was not suited to sit comfortably between two hands; it was a book designed to sit at the front of a church.
“You can’t smuggle a King James Bible,” says Watt.
If you look closer, the next thing that you notice about the KJB is its age. The front cover is made of worn leather, two metal clasps attached to hold everything together. The pages are an off-white colour; the language is that peculiar English so close to the language that we read and write today, but not quite the same. The font is square and elegant. The illustrations are intricate and extraordinary. A history saturates every inch of the book that is impossible to imitate. You can almost see the wrinkles of an old soul.
“When you touch it you can’t help but think ‘I am touching something that has been in existence for 400 years.’ And many people, thousands of people, have touched this. And I am part of that history,” says Sweeney. “There is sort of an artifactual quality to know that it is not just any King James Bible. Seeing the original means so much to people because of what it imparts.”
The age of the book is also made apparent in some of the publishing practices.
“Paper is so ubiquitous for us now,” says Sweeny. “You don’t even think twice. But it wouldn’t have been at one time.”
“Paper was actually the single biggest expense for a printer in the period,” says Watt.
Today, we don’t think about printing a 20-page paper. Fliers frequent our mailboxes every week, and we don’t worry about it. Paperback novels often cost less than twenty dollars. Paper ruffles and crinkles all throughout our present-day world and we don’t think twice about it. The feelings surrounding the cost of paper were very different 400 years ago. In 1611, paper was too valuable to waste.
When an error was made in the text, the bible would not be reprinted. Instead, someone would go through the book and would fix the mistakes by hand. “They caught the error and they scratched it out!” said Sweeny. The most famous example in the first edition at our university occurs in the book of Micah. “Somebody has scribbled out Job” said Sweeny, “and put in the word Micah, and that is the heading at the top of the page. There are those hand-written annotations in our version.”
Interestingly enough, it is these errors in the text that reveal it to be a first edition.
“We know that we have one of the earliest ones based on some of the errors in it. In any book there are mistakes of some kind. It’s sort of like collecting hockey cards where you’re sort of interested in the mistake ones,” says Watt. Because of the mistakes, which were corrected in later editions, we can identify the age and edition of a text.
One of the biggest indications that “the times have changed” is the recent digitization of this copy of the King James Bible. If you do not feel like rubbing your fingers across the pages of this amazing book, all you have to do to see the U of M copy is check out the university library’s website. The archives department at the University of Manitoba has photographed every page of this text and made them available online for anyone to view.
This is a process that is extensive, can be expensive, and is certainly a lot of work. Today, there is a movement from book to screen, from writing to typing, from flipping to scrolling, that is happening before our very eyes. As I click on the link to view the digital version of this first edition King James Bible, I find myself wondering how the printer — who was very nearly bankrupted when he produced this very first edition of the King James Bible — would feel to see his hard work glowing on my notebook computer.
There are downsides to the digital image. “All of the digitized images are always the same size,” says Sweeney. This is definitely a drawback to the digital images as the relative size differences between different texts can become obscured. But when you realize that this one text is now universally available, the lack of scale seems like a small price to pay.
The King James Bible is a name that resonates; everyone seems to know, and also seem prone to cite, the KJB. One question that bounced around inside of my head as I sat down with Watt and Sweeney was why? There were many different editions of the bible — in Latin, French, German, and in English — that predated the King James Bible, and many more have emerged since. So what is it, then, about the King James Bible that makes it so special, so significant, so memorable?
“Sometimes it’s the age of the book, sometimes it’s the history of it and how much it’s gone through. It appeals to people for a lot of different reasons,” says Sweeney.
“One of the aims of this bible,” says Watt, “was to try to satisfy everyone. Now, of course, as largely happens with committee work, it basically satisfied no one initially. Everyone was sort of upset about it. But oddly enough, it becomes the bible that gets cited in literature.”
The language of the King James Bible is also different than the other bibles that existed during the period.
“There is something about the language of the King James Bible. It does have a very Shakespearian quality to the writing. It’s the one that speaks to people’s heart; [ . . . ] people still enjoy dipping into it for that language,” says Sweeney.
Whether you come from a religious (perhaps Anglican) background, are a history buff or an English major, or whether you are one of the many bodies filtering in and out of Dafoe Library every day, climb up the three flights of stairs, hang a left at the Icelandic Reading Room, walk up to the desk at Archives and ask for Shelley. If anyone is available to take you behind the glass windows, you can breathe over top of this famous text.
“It’s sheer poetry,” says Sweeney.
The Department of Archives and Special Collections is located on the third floor of the Elizabeth Dafoe Library, room 330, and is open between 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m., Monday to Friday. The King James Bible, along with several other rare texts, will be on display until April 2012.
A lecture by Dr. Paul Dyck, English Canadian Mennonite University exploring the surprising variety of title pages of English Bibles from the coverdale Bible of 1535 to the King James Bible of 1611 will take place at noon on March 21, in Archives and Special Collections. It will pay special attention to these title pages as combinations of image and text, and particularly as combinations meant to be read, ultimately asking how these pages speak about not only the biblical text that they introduce, but also about how that biblical text should be understood.
