Intrigue in the archives
Rare first-edition copy of the King James Bible found at the U of M
Signy Holmes Staff
The University of Manitoba’s archives might seem to be the last place one would go to find mystery and intrigue — unless one considers recent events involving a book worth half of a million dollars and possessing a paper trail leading back to 17th century British royalty.
A King James Bible donated to St. John’s College back in 1897 by Reverend Daniel Greatorex of London has recently been found to be a rare first edition copy. Other copies of this work have sold at auction for well over $450,000.
Shelley Sweeney, head of Archives and Special Collections at the University of Manitoba, said that the Bible, which was donated along with several other works, was not even considered the most important part of Greatorex’s donation to St. John’s College until recently.
The process of identification began several years ago. The book was part of an exhibit of Bibles and other religious texts that Sweeney put together with the help of Paul Dyck, a professor of English at the Canadian Mennonite University. At the time, Sweeney thought that they probably had a first edition copy, due to an early misprint that had “he” in place of “she” in Ruth 3:15.
Dyck, however, wasn’t sure. There was more than one early printing of the King James Bible with this particular error, and although Dyck was confident they had something special on their hands, he just couldn’t be sure.
“I wasn’t entirely comfortable just saying that it was the first edition,” he said, noting that this exhibit was his first chance to look at the Bible closely.
“I was mostly sure [back then] that it was a first edition, but you can be 90 per cent sure about something and there’s still that niggling doubt,” he added.
It was one of Dyck’s students, English major Jason Peters, who finally went through the process of identifying the book. He was working in the archives as part of a required practicum, and Dyck suggested that he take a look at some of the collection’s old Bibles.
Peters spent several days using David Norton’s book, A Textual History of the King James Bible, to identify the errors in the Bible and match them with those from the first edition.
“David Norton’s book really made it possible to positively identify this Bible,” said Dyck, who checked Peters’ work before confirming the Bible as a first edition copy. He was delighted, he said, to finally be certain of the book’s status.
“It was very satisfying to just page through and, page by page, see the exact errors Norton was talking about . . . . It invokes the history of the thing, to think about it being printed in a print shop in 1611 where they made mistakes.”
A mysterious note
The university’s copy of the Bible is missing a few pages at the front, but the exact number of missing pages is undetermined. Sweeney said that she’s having trouble finding a complete copy to do a comparison.
“Even the one on Early English Books online, which shows you the actual bible, is missing even more than we are. We have more pages than they have, yet that’s supposed to be the authoritative text that everybody’s supposed to use.”
Included with the book is a rare genealogy of Jesus, which Sweeney said “starts with God and goes through Adam and Eve and through people until it gets to Christ — pages and pages and pages.”
One more thing deepened the mystery of the origins of the book: “Tucked inside the book there was actually a library card that said: ‘Believed to have been in the property of King James the First.’ We didn’t know where this card came from or what it referred to.”
“Since then we’ve found a list of Daniel Greatorex’s books that has a hand-written note saying the same thing . . . that’s from 1926,” added Sweeney.
The trail has since run cold, so will we ever know if this book was owned by royalty nearly 400 years ago?
Sweeney said there’s still hope of finding the truth. One way of doing so would be to look through lists of the King’s possessions, which may describe the book in enough detail for them to identify it. Another option is to continue following the trail begun by that typewritten library card to see where it leads.
“My thinking is that they must have gotten that information from Greatorex; they couldn’t have figured that on their own unless there was something in the physical format . . . maybe there was something to do with the size, maybe that size would have been a presentation copy or a copy of great importance, and that’s where [they got] the idea that it was a part of King James’ household,” suggested Sweeney.
It could be that this mystery will never be solved. Sweeney said that without full-time staff working on the more than 25,000 books in the rare books room, there are plenty of surprises awaiting us that no one has the time to uncover.
Sweeney herself has “eight or nine” projects going right now, but said that she and other archives staff do what they can with the rare books collection. The problem is that what they do just doesn’t seem like enough.
“There is so much in there that could be brought to people’s attention,” said Sweeney regretfully.
According to her, one important example of potential knowledge going to waste is the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Originally published in 1499, this Latin novel was written anonymously but is as full of strange clues as any buff of The Da Vinci Code could wish.
By taking the first letter of each chapter, scholars spelled out POLIAM FRATER FRANCISCVS COLVMNA PERAMAVIT, or, “Brother Francesco Colonna dearly loved Polia.”
In addition, said Sweeney, the illustrations, which are gorgeous woodcuts of strange dream imagery and scenery, do not seem to follow the text. She believes the book has many secrets to reveal.
“It should have been a huge, huge issue . . . but we just don’t have time [to work on it],” she admitted.
It is little wonder, then, that one of the things Sweeney hopes will result from the identification of the King James Bible is funding from the university for full-time staff.
A milepost in history
With budgets as tight as they are these days, that extra funding will depend on whether studying the rare books collection is considered a priority.
The Rev. John Stafford, dean of theology at St. John’s College, believes that the King James Bible was a milepost in history, and not just in Christian history.
“Historically, it made the Bible accessible and available in ways that had not been possible . . . the New World had only recently been discovered from a European perspective, and lo and behold, the King James version of the Bible happens at the same time, and it is exported. Wherever there are English-speaking colonies, the Bible goes along with them. And so it simply becomes embedded within the English-speaking world.”
He also said he believes the Bible was an important scholarly work, uniting and sometimes dividing the best minds in England at the time.
“The 1611 edition of the Bible was intended to be a version that would provide some sense of religious unification. It was a convocation of scholarly Bishops and university professors. Different parts of the Bible were farmed out in a way that’s not dissimilar to how a major translation would be done today,” said Stafford.
The creation of the Bible was such a difficult process that Adam Nicolson has written a book, entitled God’s Secretaries, detailing the politics and backbiting that accompanied the translation.
“People thought then that words really mattered,” said Stafford, and he is not alone in thinking that this may account for the staying power of the King James Bible, which is used to this day.
“[The King James Bible] was intentionally translated to be momentous,” said Dyck. He compared the language used to that of Shakespeare, and said that even in 1611, people didn’t really talk in the way these works might suggest.
“A student asked me not too long ago: ‘Do people talk this way?’ . . . I said to her, that’s a little bit like watching “The Matrix” in the future and asking: ‘Did people fly around like this in the year 2000?’.”
A work as rich as the King James Bible, as well as other holdings of the university’s rare books collection, is indeed an important piece of history. But in today’s world, where Rev. Michael Hinton recently printed a 20,000 word version of the Bible for today’s impatient society, who has the time or patience to wade through ancient texts?
Well, Stafford and Dyck both believe it’s worth the effort to hold on to our history, though they acknowledge that today’s world is faster-paced.
“It’s a generation of instant results; we are oftentimes quite impatient in our reading and it may be that at times we don’t read as thoroughly as we used to, but . . . these ancient texts don’t yield their results with a cursory reading,” said Stafford.
“You have to read them carefully, patiently, thoughtfully and critically, too. That takes time. It’s complex material and it needs careful and patient handling.”
As for Sweeney, she hopes that the immense popularity of The Da Vinci Code will help spark people’s interest in ancient texts.
“People, by knowing or by touching or seeing something that was produced 400 years ago, can say, ‘I am in direct contact with history.’”
So what other secrets do the university’s collections hold? Only time will tell.
