For four centuries, the Anglican community has regarded KJV as a book of divinely inspired truth and the foundation of its religion, knowledge and law and despite its great age and archaic language, it remains a firm favourite with Christians worldwide.
But while the KJV text may be have been inspired by divinity, it’s printing was down to man, and behind its production is a complicated, obscure and worldly story of litigation, bankruptcy, sabotage and imprisonment.
In the beginning
Rendering the original biblical texts into English vernacular took more than 100 years, and several Bibles were issued before the KJV. Translations began with the followers of John Wycliffe who undertook the first complete English translations of the scriptures in the 15th century. The Wycliffe Bible pre-dated the printing press, but was nevertheless widely circulated in manuscript form.
In 1525, William Tyndale embarked on a translation of the New Testament and this was the first printed Bible in English. In 1539, during the reign of Henry VIII, the Church of England issued the Great Bible, the first authorised version in English, based on Tyndale’s translation of the Old and New Testaments.
When Mary I became Queen in 1553, she returned the Church of England to the communion of the Roman Catholic faith and many religious reformers fled to Geneva where they undertook a translation that became known as the Geneva Bible.
On the accession of Queen Elizabeth I in 1558, the many flaws of both the Great Bible and the Geneva Bible were highlighted and so the newly recommissioned Church of England responded in 1568 with the Bishops’ Bible. However, this new version failed to displace the Geneva translation as the most popular English Bible of the age because it was only printed in lectern editions, which were too large and too costly for most pockets.
However, in May 1601, King James VI of Scotland attended the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in Fife, where proposals were put forward for a new translation of the Bible into English. Two years later, he acceded to the throne of England as King James I of England: the ground was prepared for the KJV, which was first published in 1611.
Until 1629, printing the KJV was entirely carried out by Richard Barker, the King’s Printer. Barker had a monopoly to not only print the KJV, but also the Bishops’ Bible and the Geneva Bible. His position should have been lucrative, but Bible printing brought Barker more problems than profit.
Folio Bibles were (and still are) expensive to produce and slow to give a return on investment. The KJV alone involved Barker in costs of at least £3,500, which he raised by selling stock at wholesale rate, and borrowing from two rival London printers, Bonham Norton and John Bill, who first became his partners, later his legal adversaries and, finally, his alleged saboteurs.
It was intended each printer would print a portion of the text, share printed sheets with the others, and split the proceeds. Bitter financial arguments erupted as Barker accused Norton and Bill of concealing their profits, while they in turn charged Barker with selling sheets due to them as partial Bibles for ready money.
Litigation, fines, debt and imprisonment dogged them all and titular and actual tenure of the office of King’s Printer passed between them as their fortunes varied.
Divine labour
Barker worked his men hard and they produced a staggering amount of work, as he flooded the market. Between 1611 and 1613 Barker’s compositors completely re-set the KJV text 13 times, the KJV New Testament twice, four Geneva Bibles, three Geneva New Testaments and a Bishops’ Bible New Testament. They fulfilled the church demand for folio Bibles, and provided something for most other budgets.
To cope with production, Barker employed the common practice of page-for-page resetting. In each format, every verso page ended at the same point, thus greatly speeding production by enabling simultaneous working on different parts of the text, either within one printing house or spread round several. Various compositors worked from several copies of an edition and it is doubtful there was much checking of the work against a single master copy. Page-for-page printing also allowed sheets from one impression to be mixed with sheets from another to make economical use of any over-supply.
This prompted more savings: Baker sold his Bibles for quick cash before they were fully printed thus missing out on the better prices that might have been achieved by waiting until the printing was completed.
Inevitably with so great an output, textual accuracy suffered and typesetting was made all the more difficult as the compositors were working directly from the translators’ handwritten manuscripts.
Some of the errors came from the original copy, while others were contributed by the compositors themselves. Because there was insufficient type to set the whole Bible, several pages were composed simultaneously and printed on multiple presses. Errors were usually the result of apprentices incorrectly distributing the type and muddling u and n, and c, t and e.
However, one mistake was probably deliberate and it suggests workplace tension inevitable under a driving master: in Psalms 119, 161, instead of "princes have persecuted me with out a cause", copies of the first octavo of 1612 read "printers have persecuted me with out a cause".
Visually, every typographic feature of the KJV was present in the 1602 Bishops’ Bible – plus a few additions that were particular to Barker. The first edition of the KJV was given added formality with the inclusion of Cornelis Boel’s copperplate engraving on the Old Testament title page (pictured) stressing the newness of the text.
The New Testament also had its own title page, a woodcut design cluttered with ornamentation surrounding the title itself. This baroque ornamentation is typical of Barker’s work. This title page was first used for some copies of the 1602 Bishops’ Bible and became the standard Barker title page for the KJV Old and New Testaments.
Author of confusion
When the KJV was launched it faced real competition from imported Geneva Bibles which, according to Archbishop William Laud: "By the numerous coming over of the Bibles... from Amsterdam, there was a great and just fear conceived that by little and little printing would be carried out of the kingdom. For the books, which came thence were better printed, better bound, better paper, and for all the charges of bringing, sold better cheap. And would any man buy a worse Bible dearer, that might have a better more cheap?"
The eventual success of the KJV owed nothing to the superior quality of the translation nor to the attractiveness of its typography. Rather it can be attributed to Barker’s monopoly of the market, and a crackdown on imports ensured it became the only Bible in England. In a fair competition, it would probably have lost out.
Today the KJV faces even greater competition from a plethora of Bibles – the Amplified Bible, Contemporary English, Good News, New English, New Century, Jerusalem and the Revised English, to say nothing of the Bibles for children, for women, for the blind, and of course electronic versions. However, it remains the most enduring and beloved of all our Bibles.
For its maiden printer, however, things weren’t as rosy. Robert Barker’s run as the King’s Printer finally came to an end in 1631 when it was discovered the word ‘not’ was missing from the seventh commandment, thus instructing worshippers: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery’. Barker alleged the error was sabotage on the part of Norton and Bill. Known as the ‘Wicked Bible’, the Archbishop of Canterbury ordered the book be burnt and Barker was sent to prison where he stayed until his death.
COMMEMORATIVE COMMUNION
Over the Easter weekend, The Henningham Family Press (HFP) represented the printing world at a North London event to celebrate the printing of the first King James Bible. Among a whole host of attractions on offer at the celebration, including film, music and poetry, HFP spent the week previous with a selection of artists creating a poster print of the seven days of creation. On the night of the event, they then made prints of this creation live on stage with what they termed a "performance print production line" that included the use of gold-effect bronze pigments.
HFP’s David Henningham says: "We put out an open call to printers, writers and artists to submit work. Then they congregated in our workshop to design the print as a booklet and do some initial printing. We then assembled at the live show to do the final screen as a production line with a small silkscreen and some hairdryers. All participants were dressed in a colour of the spectrum and we were accompanied by a Casio keyboard playing Terry Riley’s Curve of the Rainbow."
