My friend Jeff Baldwin, one of the co-founders of Worldview Academy, divides the world up into two kinds of people: streamliners and complicators. As the labels suggest, streamliners are always simplifying, always pushing toward greater efficiency, while complicators go through life making everything harder on themselves and everyone around them. Talk to Jeff long enough and you begin to realize there is only one true streamliner in the world -- himself -- and the rest of us, in different ways, are complicators! Still, when it comes to Bible design, I think he has a point.
As a design project, the Bible is nothing if not complicated. There's a huge volume of text to contend with, and it comes in a variety of genres, each calling for sensitive treatment. Binding all sixty-six books under a single cover is itself the chief complication. If you give each word enough room on the page, and each line an appropriate length, and if you allow each page an elegant proportion, and print the result on paper sufficiently opaque for comfortable reading, what you end up with is a massive tome. To get around this, you must either split it up into volumes or compromise somewhere else: thinner paper, tiny print, double columns, cramped lines.
Above: Thompson Chain Reference layout.
Great for study? People swear by them.
A little complicated? You bet.
Now suppose you layer in another series of complications. Divide the text into chapters and verses, adding footnotes and headings where appropriate. Devote a column of space to cross-references. Break up long words into accented syllables for easier pronunciation. Extend margins for note-taking. Add charts and diagrams. Set off selected texts in a different color. The possibilities are endless, and there's a case to be made for each one. No matter how significant the alteration, no matter how infinitesimal the gain, I'm betting there will always be someone who's a fan of the change and insists on having it.
And that's how you get to where we are today. The Bible has begun to look like a very expensive Swiss watch with displays for day and date, moon phases, power reserves, and Greenwich Mean Time -- very desirable complications, to an enthusiast -- but not so helpful (maybe even a bit of a hindrance) to someone who's just trying to figure out what time it is.
Above: "Sorry I'm late, I was checking my watch."
That's why I think the most important trend in Bible design right now is the desire to streamline. Instead of offering more and more apparatus, the streamlining impulse wants to strip as much away as possible, to roll back the wave of enhancements until we're left, more or less, with the text. Instead of offering a Bible that's kind of helpful for a lot of tasks (devotional, personal study, scholarship, teaching, etc.), the goal is to optimize the layout for one task: reading.
This is not such a hard thing to achieve. It takes real talent to design a complicated Bible in such a way that its complications don't overwhelm the text. All it takes to come up with a streamlined Bible is an elegantly proportioned single-column grid, an appropriate page size, a classic typeface, and a basic understanding of how prose and poetry are best laid out. When in doubt, refer to just about any Peguin paperback of the mid-twentieth century.
Above: Forget about mid-century, here's a recent Penguin paperback.
This is a man after my own heart. Follow the link for a great project idea.
I've been writing about this for a number of years, and over time I've reviewed several editions that at least aspire to this kind of simplicity. For the most part, though, today's default editions represent a compromise between the extremes. They aren't nearly as complicated-looking as some nineteenth century examples, back when the old verse-per-line, self-pronouncing mania reigned supreme, but they've retained "sensible" complications: double columns to balance the tiny print, chapter and verse notations (now embedded in paragraphed text), sometimes book introductions.
This represents a lot of progress in comparison with the past. When I'm reading such an edition (like the Cambridge Pitt Minion, for example), I don't boil with rage or find myself baffled or blinded by the complicated design choices.
Still, I long for the day when every translation can boast at least one streamlined, reader-friendly format executed in a quality way. For me that means a single column, paragraphed text with a minimum of intrusions (discrete chapter and verse notations, no additional references), elegant proportions, good paper -- basically a nice, thick, hand-filling volume not too different in appearance than any other book I'd typically spend a long time reading.
Why eBibles Are (Finally) A Good Thing
Several people have asked why I'm not excited about the new "personal size" ESV Study Bible, which offers most of the content of its 6 x 9" (more or less) big brother but in a smaller 5 x 8" (give or take) format. The thing is, I think it's a great idea, and I really am pleased to see Crossway expanding the line this way. But for me, it's the solution to a problem I don't have, thanks to Olive Tree.
I've had an iPhone since they first came out, and despite some initial skepticism I now have an iPad, too. Both of them have Olive Tree's ESV Study Bible app loaded, which means I carry the ESV SB with me pretty much everywhere, but only have to think about it when I actually need it.
Above: Warp factor ten nerdiness.
A photo of my iPad ESV SB taken with my iPhone,
with my own reflection staring back at me.
It's all good until the power goes out.
If you've followed my writing at all, you know I'm not one of those philistines who's greeting the advent of e-books with delight: "Awesome! Now we can burn all the printed books!" I have my doubts about the whole thing, and suspect we're going to be losing more in abandoning the printed book than we did it ditching the compact disc. Still, even I can't deny the impact technology is making on the way we experience the text.
Above: When my anxiety about the non-physical future gets too intense,
I just flip over my iPad for a soothing reminder.
Of course, Bible software is nothing new. It's just that, until recently, going all-virtual with the Bible required a nerdy impracticality bordering on lunacy. Back in the 90s, there were guys rocking self-annotated Bibles on their awesome home PCs, laughing at those of us still backward enough to be toting paper copies. But the rest of us knew the joke was on them. Now, not so much.
Technology has tamed all the notes and references that overwhelmed the printed page. You can toggle that stuff off and on like so many projector overlays (well, sort of). And while you might expect a lover of leather, glue, thread, paper, and ink to deplore the fact, I think it's probably good news for printed Bibles. Why? Because it takes the pressure off.
You don't really need to squeeze every little thing into a printed Bible anymore. Sure, they're still trying, but as time goes on that's going to seem increasingly pointless ... kind of like the physical edition of the NET Bible if, like me, you only use it for the notes. Most of us will be using simple, text-only printed Bibles (if we use any printed Bibles at all) and whipping out the iDevice when we need to drill down into the helps. It'll save room on the page, save weight, and improve human relations with calf- and goatskin donors (the things the non-Bibliophiles just call "animals").
The point is, the rise of convenient eBibles creates an opportunity for publishers to start exploring streamlined, reader-focused formats. The next generation of "helps" will start off as digital tools, offering features a printed page can't hope to replicate. So why bother trying? There's one thing the printed page can still do better, one place where digital ink's got nothing on real ink. A clean, transparent reading experience is all we'll really need from our Bibles a few years from now. So why not start making them today?
Posted on January 27, 2011 at 12:59 PM in Commentary | Permalink | Comments (22)
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