Bible Design and Binding

Bibles and Notebooks

Wide-margin Bibles are one way to keep your notes, but there's an argument to be made for using a separate journal. A teaching outline can get pretty cramped in the confines of an inch-wide margin. Using a notebook gives you room to spread out. They're easier to write in, too, when your only solid surface is your lap, as is so often the case when you're sitting in church, taking notes on a sermon. Sometimes you don't want to carry all your notes around with you, either. A separate journal gives you the option of leaving them at home.

With that in mind, let's take a look at a few combinations:

A Sneak Peak at Some Not-Yet-Reviewed Editions

Mind if I share a few photos? These are all editions I haven't reviewed here yet -- some of them might make an appearance, though. In the meantime, I figured it wouldn't hurt to have a look!

Above, a Cambridge Cameo KJV bound in stiff burgundy calfskin. No, I'm not a fan of burgundy in general, but this is one of the most attractive examples I have come across.

Another ESV Wide Margin Rebound by Mechling Bookbindery

Remember the ESV wide margin Matt Morales cut to size and rebound? Well, he's done it again, this time using Mechling Bookbindery to do the work. Here's his report on the results:

The last wide margin rebind with Paul Sawyer was intended as a gift for someone and also as a way for me to try out Paul Sawyer's style of binding. While I liked the quality of the leather, the experimental aspects (colored page edges, etc) turned out unorthodox and eventually unsatisfying -- my own fault. The bigger problem was that I placed the Bible on the counter and unknown to me there was some spilled nail polish remover -- dont ask why! -- which went to work destroying the cover's color. Overall the rebind looked great and limpness seemed very good. Yet after playing around opening different sections of the Bible, I noticed a stiffness in the spine that does not want to go away. It keeps the Bible from opening up and laying flat in books like Genesis and Exodus...something that the Mechling rebind fixed right from the start.

A (Bible) Reader's Manifesto

For awhile now, I've wondered if it would be helpful for us all to collaborate on a set of suggestions for publishers hoping to meet the demand for better quality Bibles. I'm no insider, but in my brushes with those who fit the description, I sometimes get the impression that the industry's view of the consumer and what he or she wants doesn't come close to the real thing.

WANT SOME HOLY WATER WITH THAT?
Stephanie Simon's December 25 LA Times piece about Bible marketing reinforces the feeling. Here's a taste of a Zondervan marketing discussion of the upcoming anniversary edition of the NIV Study Bible:

To celebrate [the anniversary], the company is producing an update of the NIV Study Bible, with thousands of revised footnotes. Formatted with extra-wide margins for note-taking, bound in premium leather, the new edition has been tentatively priced at $119.99.

But Randy Bishop, vice president of production, has cold feet. The existing NIV Study Bible comes in a dozen sizes and bindings, priced from $25 to $80. He wonders if customers will pay so much more for the anniversary edition.

"If you put chocolate coating on an Oreo, it's a different cookie, and you ought to be able to charge more," Caminiti argues. "The packaging has to scream that this is something really new: First time! Fudge-dipped! Chocolate-coated!"

Todd Niemeyer, vice president of sales, chuckles and murmurs, "Smoke and mirrors."

The team kicks around inexpensive ways to make the new edition stand out.

"We could put in an extra ribbon marker. . . . Maybe special parchment paper at the beginning?" Bishop suggests.

"There you go!" says Brian Scharp, vice president of Bible marketing. "The list of premium features is growing and growing."

"Gold-plated bling?" Niemeyer asks mischievously.

"A vial of Holy Land soil attached to the back?" Bishop offers, as the room dissolves in laughter.

The Zondervan staff has turned down a few ideas -- a 3-D pop-up Bible, for instance -- that they found too gimmicky. "There is a line, because it's God's word," Scharp says.

Later, though, he admits: "It's hard to draw the line in any one place and say, 'We're never going to cross that.' "

Nothing against the folks at Zondervan. I've been in marketing meetings before, and if I'd been present for this one I would no doubt have had a few wry cracks to make. But we find ourselves at a point in history when we've never had so many choices, and yet the options are mostly arrayed along a horizontal spectrum -- a thousand different flavors of the same basic thing. I'd like to see more vertical choices, and that might require a shift in perspective. Instead of speaking to end-users as consumers, we might have to start thinking of them as readers.

ONE MAN'S MANIFESTO
With that in mind, I'm going to offer what I think are essential starting points for any publisher hoping to satisfy our little segment of the market. I invite you to add your own and to take issue with mine, too. In time, I'd like this conversation to be a resource for people inside publishing organizations who need to back up their design and quality sense with anecdotal evidence from the market.

So here goes . . .

How Do You Say "Help" in Spanish?

Abraham Armenta got in touch with a question I couldn't answer. There are so many interesting editions of the Bible in English, he pointed out, but where are the fine bindings for Spanish language editions? He'd searched the internet without much luck. I gave it a go, too, with similar results. Lots of paperbacks, lots of cheap-looking bonded leather, but that was about it.

So Abraham and I are both asking for your help. Surely there are well-made editions of the Bible in Spanish -- but where? If anyone has undertaken the search, let me hear from you in the comments. Thanks!

Trevor's Stack of Bibles

Don't hate Trevor -- and don't hate me for what I'm about to show you.

By now, you'd think I'd be accustomed to the feeling. Just when I think I'm on top of the Bible design and binding landscape, that I have a handle on what's going on out there, somebody knocks me sideways with a photo of editions I've never seen before. In Trevor's case, I'm still on the ground. Let's take a look at another view, top to bottom.

Pocket Canon (KJV)

Blandness and kitsch are the Scylla and Charybdis between which any attempt at an innovative Bible design must navigate. You can drop text into double columns, print on thin, white paper, and slap a plain black cover on, and you're guaranteed to have something that looks the part, in the way a bunch of groomsmen in rented tuxes do. They don't look great, but you know what they're supposed to be. Or, you can throw restraint to the wind and offer a line-up of crazy looks that look better suited to Mardi Gras than the typical church service. The tuxes still look rented, but they're pink with ruffled shirts. To me, neither option is particularly satisfying. I want to see some design sense applied to the Good Book, but that doesn't mean I want to jettison all sense of aesthetic taste.

Which is why, nearly a decade later, I'm still impressed with the Pocket Canon.

R. L. Allan's Oxford Brevier Blackface Reference Edition

It's appeared several photos. I've mentioned it a time or two. But until now, I've never posted my thoughts on the Oxford Brevier Blackface Reference Edition from R. L. Allan. This is quite an omission, considering the Brevier Blackface was the first Bible I ever purchased from R. L. Allan, the beginning of the affair, so to speak. So why the long silence? It's one of those love/hate situations. If you think of this edition as the child of Allan's and Oxford, I love what Allan's contributed to the gene pool and feel pretty ambivalent about the Oxford chromosome. It all comes down to one little word: blackface. Whether you love or hate this edition depends entirely on how dark you like your text. If you don't like cream in your coffee or moon in your night, the Brevier Blackface might be the ticket. For everyone else, I recommend the Longprimer.

First, let me explain why I chose Oxford over Cambridge. R. L. Allan offers its own editions from both publishers, and there are actually more options to choose from on the Cambridge side of the equation. The Oxford settings of the KJV tend to look a bit antiquated, as well, both because of the font and the self-pronouncing feature, which might be nice when reading aloud, but doesn't do the intelligibility of the page any favors. Still, I chose an Oxford edition for variety's sake. By the time I discovered Allan's, I already had a shelf full of Cambridge KJVs!

Nelson Signature Slimline KJV

The picture says it all, right? According to the official site, the Nelson Signature series is "bound in the softest, most supple and durable calfskin," and you can clearly see the result: a Bible that can bend over backwards -- literally. These days, the edition pictured (#2019) goes under the title KJV UltraSlim Bible, but when I purchased it back in 2000, they were still calling it the Slimline Edition, so I'll stick with that nomenclature. Whatever you call it, this is an excellent Bible -- and, I would argue, a historically significant one.

LUXURY VS. QUALITY
A generation or two ago, the fact that a Bible was printed on India paper with a sewn binding and a calf or goatskin binding would have signaled quality. Today, quality has been redefined as a luxury. We pay a premium to get what it would have been unthinkable to omit not too many years back -- and if we do pay, there's always the chance a well-meaning brother will come along and denounce us for our extravagance. So we're left with a strange paradox. By traditional standards, most of the Bibles available to us are shoddy productions, but saying so makes us seem superficial.

One Year Later: Two Bibles Rebound by Mechling

The Bible Design and Binding Blog has featured a lot of rebinding work recently -- and there's more on the way. Maybe you're wondering how some of these editions hold up over time. After all, even the saddest genuine leather editions can look spiffy out of the box. It's when they're actually used that the faults begin to show. Matt Morales sent me some photos about a couple of Bibles he had rebound a year ago by Mechling, along with a write-up, and I'm passing them along because they illustrate the point that many people still miss about quality bindings. What matters isn't how they look today, but how they perform over time. Here's Matt --

Two years ago I sent an ESV Classic Reference edition and a 25-year-old NASB reference edition to Mechling to be rebound. The black ESV was my wife's, which after only a year of use had begun to fall apart. The 25-year-old burgundy NASB was a gift from my mother.

Both Bibles were rebound with the deluxe binding package with no frills attached, and both were done in the original color that they came with. The turnaround was two weeks and the Bibles arrived in great condition. Of note: I did have both Bibles re-sewn by Mechling to add strength.

One year later, both Bibles have grown considerably more flexible (notice the black ESV) and feel great -- with no signs of falling apart. The goatskin cover and sheepskin lining are both very supple. My only complaint is that the ribbons fray to easily ... which is why I sent stronger ones when rebinding the wide margin.

The cost was $159 a piece. All in all, it was money well spent.

Thanks, Matt, for sharing these. I'm impressed with the flexibility of the black ESV -- that bent-over-backward snapshot is positively yoga-like. You make an excellent point, too, about the way good bindings tend to improve with use (while bad ones just fall apart)!