Bible Design and Binding

Bible Plus Coffee Equals Disaster?

Jonathan Summers poses a question for those of us who enjoy reading the Bible over morning coffee (and worry about getting coffee all over the Bible):

Q. "For those of us who enjoy a good cup of java while reading Bibles, is there anything you can do about coffee stains in pages? My dad once spilled coffee all over Romans 9 in a brand new deluxe ESV."

A. When I was a kid, I used to soak regular paper in coffee to give it the faux parchment look. I discovered the trick in one of those activities for children books -- Step 1 in the "create your own buried treasure map" chapter, I think. The only thing you can do for coffee stains in a Bible is dip the rest of it, too, so you get an even, antiqued look. On hot days, or when your hands warm the pages, your Bible will give off a great aroma, too.

I have a history with coffee catastrophes. At the Genius Desk inside the Apple Store in the Houston Galleria, they used to call me "the guy who poured the latte into his 17 inch Powerbook." I earned this reputation by setting a full 20-ounce cup of Starbucks behind my laptop screen (right by the air vent), then forgetting about it until I knocked it over. The liquid emptied straight into the vent, and I was none the wiser until the screen flickered and went dark. When I picked the computer up off the desk, coffee literally poured from the case. I figured it was done for, but once it had time to dry, everything worked fine. And whenever the cooling fan came on, the air filled with a pleasant coffee aroma.

Not that I learned my lesson or anything.

Repairing a Torn Page?

Abraham Armenta has a dilemma: his two-year-old decided to manually redact the book of 1 John 3. The question is, how to repair the damage? I haven't faced this problem myself, so I did a little searching online and came up with a couple of tutorials:

(a) How to repair a torn page (b) A Simple Book Repair Manual: Torn Pages

The trick seems to be in using document repair tape. Since I haven't done it, though, I'm wondering if anyone else out there has experience repairing torn Bible pages? Are there better techniques? Any special considerations when it comes to India paper? Please share!

UPDATE: Thanks to Matt Blair, we now have a pictorial of the process. Check out Matt's Flickr photo-set Fixing a torn page for an object lesson in how it's done. Matt also used his aforementioned method of adding ribbons to add three to his Deluxe Compact ESV, so check out those pictures, too.

Cambridge ESV Pitt Minion Update: Brown Goatskin and More

Last week, I shared some details about Cambridge's upcoming editions of the English Standard Version, thanks to David Dewey, who chatted with the folks from Cambridge at the Christian Resources Exhibition. The discussion afterward raised some questions, and Brian Vos, the director of Bibles and E-commerce for Baker Publishing Group, which distributes Cambridge Bibles in the US, offered some extra details and a correction. Here's what he said (with emphasis added by me):

The ESV Pitt Minion will be available in brown goatskin with black-letter text, rather than calfskin as noted in the entry. Based on the comments, this will be welcome news. And the July or August date is when the Pitt Minion will release in the UK, but the official release date in the US is October. We will ship them as soon as we have them in the US, but there is a significant shipping time to consider. The four editions will be black goatskin with red letter, brown goatskin with black letter, burgundy French Morocco with red letter, and two-tone tan/burgundy with black letter text. The goatskin editions will have art-gilt edges.

Naturally, I'm lining up for the brown goatskin, and will post lots of photos once I get it. Special thanks to Brian for sharing the good news.

Iyov on The Nonesuch KJV

People are always complaining that reading this blog costs them money. Well, the shoe is on the other foot now. Iyov just posted about the amazing Nonesuch KJV, prompting me to hunt down a copy of the three-volume set and click the "buy now" button. Be warned: if you follow the link and have any love at all for the Authorized Version, be prepared to go and do likewise.

Nonesuch KJV

Even if you're not a KJV fan, follow the link and check out the magnificent typography. As Iyov says, this is a Bible meant for reading.

New Details on the Cambridge ESV Pitt Minion

David Dewey attended the Christian Resources Exhibition, the largest event of its kind in the UK, where he had the opportunity to chat with the Bible publishing staff of Cambridge University Press. Here's the latest information about the forthcoming ESV Pitt Minion:

Expected publication date: July or August, with the wide margin a few months later

Text: ESV (2007 revisions) with American spellings

Red letter? There will be a choice of red and black letter editions

Covers: Tu-tone, French Morocco and Calfskin

One will be a brown Calfskin, black letter edition.

Print: the same as other Pitt Minions in the series (NIV, KJV, NKJV). Very readable in my opinion.

Cross-references: the same as in the Crossway editions

Concordance: some as in Crossway editions, but a more extensive concordance is promised for the wide margin editions

Cost: £33 up. French Morocco c. £55; and calfskin somewhat more

I'm very pleased to hear about the brown calfskin black-letter edition! Thanks, David, for sharing this information with everyone.

Adding a Ribbon to Your Bible

Why moan and complain about the lack of ribbons in your Bible when you can take a page from Matt Blair's book and add them yourself? Matt, who blogs at The Foolish Galatian, has created a photo tutorial demonstrating his method, which involves a pencil, epoxy, some ribbon, and scissors. Check it out:

Adding Ribbons to Your Bible

You may be wondering why anyone would need more than a single ribbon, so here's a quick explanation of the multi-ribbon craze. If you're reading your Bible front to back, or you only use your ribbon to mark a single passage (say, the text for a particular sermon), then one will do fine. But suppose you adopt a reading plan that involves daily excerpts from the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Psalms? You'll need three ribbons to mark each place. Prayer books and breviaries, which send readings back and forth in search of the various parts of a single service -- order, psalter, collect, lectionary readings, etc. -- have long sported multiple ribbons, often of various colors, but until relatively recently, it was unusual to find a Bible with more than a single ribbon. Now, having two is considered a luxury, but the optimal number seems to be three (OT, NT, Psalms).

With Matt's help, you can now add ribbons to your heart's content!

R. L. Allan's Oxford Long Primer in Highland Goatskin

"Maybe you should try the Long Primer." I'd given that advice a thousand times to people who e-mailed looking for a nice, readable edition of the KJV in a quality binding. I said maybe because I'd never seen one myself. Based on what I knew of R. L. Allan's, I assumed the Long Primer was good. Nicholas Gray, who presides over the Glasgow-based temple of goodness, confided that the Long Primer was his favorite setting of the KJV, and other Bible Design Blog readers said the same thing. So when the box arrived from Scotland including, among other things, a copy of Item #53 -- "Allan's Oxford Reference Bible, Long Primer with Chain References, Goatskin Leather, Cyclopedic Concordance" -- I was anxious to see if the recommendation I'd been making was any good.

Not that I was worried.

Above: The supple Long Primer cover inspired some new Bible yoga positions. Here, the cover is curled into the gutter between the pages, showing off the goatskin's flexibility and grain, and providing a glimpse of the elegant typography within.

The official description has this to say: "Highland goatskin with overlapping (full yapp) covers, leather lined inside in dark blue, with dictionary of proper names, subject index and concordance." The list price is £90, which works out to $177 in today's US dollars. That's expensive, but then, this is a once-in-a-lifetime purchase for all but the inveterate collectors. And I have to say, the Long Primer has that once-in-a-lifetime feel.

First Look: Deluxe Compact ESV (Sienna / Crossroads Design)

Thanks to the intrepid Scott Kay, we can take our first look at the Deluxe Compact ESV from Crossway in its TruTone Sienna (Crossroads) incarnation. This is the successor to the original Compact Thinline, with a new layout, slightly enlarged proportions and a sewn binding. If you ask me, it's a big improvement. Let's take a look:

Above: Each of the four editions currently available has a novelty cover, but the Sienna (Crossroads Design) option is the subtlest. I like the simulated grain and the variation in the brown color. And I can live with the design.

My Interview in Volume 90 of the Mars Hill Audio Journal

This isn't a commercial interruption so much as it is a giddy outburst. Some of you know that, after the release of my book Rethinking Worldview, I was interviewed by Ken Myers for the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Well today Volume 90 was released to subscribers, and my interview is right at the beginning. I'm pleased. No, make that thrilled. When people ask me to recommend resources for "thinking Christians," Mars Hill Audio Journal is always the first thing I suggest (followed by a subscription to Books & Culture), so it's surreal -- in the good way, not the clock melting on a branch way) to find myself included. I've listened to the interview, but I still have a hard time believing it really happened.

Anyway, I wanted to share my joy with the rest of you, and encourage you to subscribe to Mars Hill Audio Journal. It is the intellectual equivalent of a goatskin binding.

Why Paragraphs? Why Single Column?

It never hurts to restate one's first principles, especially when new readers come along who don't know what all the fuss is about. Why is it better for the text of Scripture to be set in paragraphs instead of the traditional verse-per-line format? Why is a single column setting preferable to the much-more-common double-column arrangement? Does any of this really make a difference? For most of us, the meaty, controversial topic where Scripture is concerned is translation. How the words end up on the page is a matter of indifference. It seems trivial to lock horns over mere formatting when we could be grappling over Hebrew and Greek, or sparring about which English words in which combination are comprehensible to which English speakers. I understand. I find all that stuff fascinating, too. But there's something to be said for matters usually dismissed as superficial.

If you don't mind, I'll begin with a story. As a writer, I've been known to frequent what's called a "workshop." This is a regular get-together at a coffee shop or some other plausible venue, in which a group of authors trade photocopies of their work for purposes of critique. These manuscripts have never been eyeballed by an editor, so their formatting depends entirely on the author -- and these days, technology being what it is, a lot of manuscripts are passed back and forth electronically, losing formatting as they go. At one meeting, a writer passed out a stack of pages for discussion at the next meeting. I took them home and read them a few days later. To me, it looked like a rather long prose poem. Lines ended randomly but often in interesting ways, some paragraphs had extra space in between, while others were jammed up against each other. I wrestled with some of the stranger line endings, and giving the author the benefit of the doubt, assumed he'd undertaken something extremely subtle, something I couldn't quite figure out. But I tried, and eventually came up with a few pages of notes.

When we met, the first thing he did was apologize for the formatting. His short story (!) had been e-mailed back and forth, breaking the lines in odd places and adding lots of mysterious spacing he couldn't account for. Most of my commentary was based on the assumption that I was reading poetry. By re-formatting the lines, things became clear. The piece wasn't as difficult as I'd thought, but it wasn't as clever, either. I read it, yes, but I read into it, too. All because of a glitch in formatting.