Bible Design and Binding

Realistic Expectations

Imagine the scene: A group of readers from the Bible Design and Binding Blog visit the Holy Land on a retreat, and while trekking through the countryside stumble into an ancient cave full of undisturbed clay pots. Inside, they find perfectly preserved first-century manuscripts of the Old and New Testament. What sort of conversation might ensue?

Reader 1: "This paper isn't very good."

Reader 2: "You're right. I can see words from the other side of the parchment bleeding through. How am I supposed to read this?"

Reader 1: (balancing a scroll in his hand) "It's pretty stiff, isn't it?"

Reader 2: "Here, let's fold the sides over like Bertrand does in the review pictures."

[Parchment disintegrates]

Reader 2: "Wow, I'm not impressed with that."

Reader 1: "No kidding. These scrolls are, like, priceless -- and at that price point I expect quality materials and workmanship. What is that? Bonded parchment? Feels like cardboard to me."

Reader 2: (holding a manuscript fragment to his eye) "I could do without this font, too. It's not exactly readable...."

Reader 1: "At least it's not a red letter edition."

Reader 2: "Indeed."

You get the idea. I'm picking on readers, but let's face it: I'm the king of high expectations. I can imagine the frustration of a Bible designer trying to balance costs and the marketing department's notions of what people want, tuning in here only to find his hard work being compared unfavorably to the Platonic ideal of a Bible. And of course there are the people who stumble upon this site every day, perfectly content with their well-worn bonded leather editions, who if anything consider the pages falling out a mark of distinction, wondering why anyone would major so much on the minors the way we do here.

To all those who wonder, I just want to acknowledge that, yes, I realize my expectations aren't always realistic. I realize, too, that there's something strange about writing so much about a largely unattainable ideal. What keeps me going, though, is the belief that it isn't unattainable -- that, if people only wanted it more, it could be easily achieved.

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 . . .

Join the Conversation

This is a quick note to welcome our many new readers to the Bible Design and Binding Blog. The message of this blog is, You are not alone! There are people out there who share your obsessive interest in quality and aesthetics, and this is where they hang out. Read the reviews and blog posts, but most importantly be sure to check out the comments threads, where people with much more insight than I have are freely sharing it. I want to thank everyone who has contributed to the dialogue, and encourage those of you who are just lurking to jump right in. This is a place to have your questions answered, so ask away!

Pet Peeve: Keeping Bibles Behind the Counter

I'm not as hard on Christian bookstores as I used to be. It's a tough business to be in, and the products offered (or not offered) on the shelves are just as much a reflection of the evangelical consumer as the bookseller's personal taste, if not more so. The last thing I want to do here is gripe that Christian bookstores aren't perfect. Of course they're not. And with Internet sales taking a chunk out of the pie and big box retailers stocking more and more Christian books, things are not getting easier. Still, there are some things I would love to see change, and this might be a forum for putting them out there.

More than once, I've entered an unfamiliar bookstore only to find that the books I'm looking for -- Bibles -- are tucked away behind the counter, inaccessible without the assistance of a clerk. If the store isn't busy and the clerk is easy-going, this doesn't present too much of an inconvenience, although I can't help feeling some cognitive dissonance. Bibles behind the counter? You need permission to touch? Doesn't seem right somehow.

Bibles for Reading, or Reference?

I already mentioned the thirty-day test drive on the Literary Study Bible, but Michael Spencer of Internet Monk fame has posted a review, "Ten Reasons to Love the ESV Literary Study Bible," that's worth checking out. He highlights the format's value in the classroom, where he wants to instill in students a big-picture understanding of Scripture, rather than the traditional microscope scrutiny of verses and phrases in isolation. Which prompts the question, how is the Bible meant to be read?

If I had to boil down my perspective on Bible design, I could distill it into one statement: The Bible is for reading, not a reference work. On the inside, the Bibles I grew up with looked like nineteenth century reference books: crusy old fonts, crowded double columns, an alphabet of symbols hovering over every line. Verses were set off one to a line, difficult words divided up syllabically with pronunciation guides. While the importance of reading the Bible was stressed, in everyday use I was more likely to see people grab a Bible to "look something up." The sorts of Scripture knowledge we valued involved being able to recite verses from memory or having a command of obscure trivia. The "Master Story Line" Spencer mentions in his review wasn't much in evidence.

Giving Your Bible Away

In the comments a few days ago, Dan Edelen of Cerulean Sanctum fame shared this story:

I won a sales contest in Bibles one year and the top Bible awarded was an NIV Study Bible in top grain. But because I had gone so far over the limit on sales, I asked Zondervan if they'd send me the Moroccan leather--and they did! So I owned that Bible myself.

But in one of "those" kinds of stories, I encountered a man who was searching for Christ. We worked together and I was leaving to work elsewhere. On my last day, he asked me, "Where can I find a Bible that can help me understand what I'm reading?" I thought about it and gave him that goatskin NIV Bible. I knew he had no idea how much it cost, but I pray it proved infinitely more valuable to him than what I might have received from it.

This story strikes a chord with me. The first "nice" Bible I ever had was a Cambridge KJV wide-margin in Berkshire leather with a thick red ribbon. No one in town seemed to stock Cambridge Bibles back then, so I'd ordered it sight unseen from the catalog, then waited for what seemed like months for the bookstore to call (since one couldn't order direct back then). It arrived in a magnificent slipcase and filled the room with the scent of leather.