A short note about a typeface (Caslon, specifically)

I just received my copy of the Commonweal Associates Newsletter, an occasional publication for supporters of Commonweal magazine. In amongst the other news items was the following:

After redesigning the magazine in 2005, we fielded a good deal of compliments--and complaints. Reader response was mostly positive, but even fans of the revised look wondered whether the new typeface wasn't a touch too light. Well, as Jesus taught, ask and you shall receive, within at least six years. Our new new typeface, which debuted in the fall, is Caslon. It replaces the thinner-cut Goudy in headlines and body copy. You may recognize it from a little-known periodical called the New Yorker. If you haven't noticed, don't panic--the change is subtle. But important. A magazine as weighty as Commonweal ought not be printed in too light a typeface.

This assertion--that a "weighty" magazine demands a "weighty" typeface--is likely one we don't often think too much about. It brought to my mind a wonderful little book by E.R. Wendland and J.P. Louw, Graphic Design and Bible Reading,wherein they remind us that, "in the end, format does have meaning and people will assign a certain sense to the lay-out of a text according to how they happen to perceive it and interpret it" [37].

A typeface communicates more than just the words for which it is employed. It communicates a character, added-to those words. Erik Spiekermann, in his foundational Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works,makes clear that this type-character is expected to be a good match for the genre and purpose of the printed text. "Just as business people are expected to wear a suit (plus, naturally, a shirt and tie), text set for business has to look fairly serious and go about its purpose in an inconspicuous, well-organized way" [65]. Following this logic, it is only natural that "weighty" magazines are expected to sport "weighty" fonts. Serious is as serious does, after all.

Needless to say, I found it quite delightful that a magazine staff would actually come out and admit the rationale for choosing one typeface over another. While these decisions are invariably made with deliberation and care, it is not so often we get a glimpse behind the scenes into the machinations.

NPR Reports on "How the King James Bible 'Begat' English Idioms"

A few weeks back NPR's Talk of the Nation featured a conversation with David Crystal regarding his recent book Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language. In the book, Crystal set out to answer the question, "How many English language idioms come from the King James Bible?" The answer? Not as many as most people think.

"I found 257," says Crystal.

Of particular interest to me is Crystal's observation that many of the phrases that folks attribute to the KJV actually come from other English Bible versions of the period, such as the Great Bible and the Bishops' Bible. The KJV did not originate them; it merely kept them and passed them on:

So, truly, the King James Bible popularized the expressions that were already in biblical use. The King James version was appointed to be read in all churches, so "people started not just to quote these expressions, but to play with them — 'What hath Google wrought,' indeed."

This matter of the "perception" versus the "reality" of the cultural influence of the KJV is worth pondering, especially given the rampant mis-perception that the KJV was the first English translation of the Bible, or the first translation at all (or the first Bible, period).

I haven't had a chance to read Crystal's book yet, but I'll post a report up here when I do.

You can listen to the whole conversation here.

Manifold Disappointments

I just now got around to reading the June 2011 issue of Harper's Magazine, whose cover promised "King James, Revised: History's Best Seller Turns 400." This had been sitting in my pile of things for a while now, and I was glad to have some time over the Christmas break to give it a look.

I should have just left well enough alone. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I think it involved some form of actual historical/literary discussion of, you know, the King James Bible. Whatever I expected, this was not that.

"Harper's Magazine marked the quadricentennial of the King James Bible by inviting some of our finest poets and novelists to select a verse or short passage from the translation and respond to it, with no restrictions on the form of response," says the introductory blurb [p. 33]. The panel of seven contributors consists of Paul Guest, Benjamin Hale, Dan Chiasson, Marilynne Robinson, Charles Baxter, John Banville, and Howard Jacobson.

I tried. I really did. But "no restrictions," in this case, was a recipe for disaster and disappointment. Of the lot, only Robinson's contribution (one page of prose) comes close to a satisfactory engagement. Her piece serves both as a meditation on the peculiar language of the KJV (she reflects on the phrase, "The twinkling of an eye") and how that language is largely the inheritance of the KJV from a handful of other vernacular English versions preceding it. The piece is erudite, informed, and all too brief.

All to brief especially in light of the space taken by the other contributors. Three are poems. The other three (Jackson's "A Mirror Up to Nothing," Banville's "Absalom Dies," and Hale's "Lower than the Angels") are each a tired rendition of Hitchens-esque agnosticism. Hale reminds us that "the one English book more important than the King James Bible" is, of course, Darwin's On the Origin of the Species. Um. Okay. Yawn.

I love Harper's. Given that this was the cover story, and that I usually am so edified by what I find beneath their covers, I was left shaking my head a bit. Is this the best they could muster? To honor what is arguably (ahem) the most important book in English? (Apologies to Messrs. Darwin and Hale.) I honestly expected a lot more, and a lot better, than what they offered.

Discussion of "Novelty Bibles" over at Amanda Mac's"Cheese-Wearing Theology" Blog

Amanda Mac is a Canadian pastor and theologian. She recently posted a couple of articles on her blog, Cheese-Wearing Theology (I know - I wondered too. It's a Buffy reference). In the posts she takes a brief look at the American Patriot's Bible, the Poverty and Justice Bible, and a C.S. Lewis-themed Bible.

Her analysis is somewhat cursory, and exploration of her blog showed evidence of a preoccupation with authorial intent with which I take some exceptions, but still, her posts are worth a look.

(Many thanks to Jennifer Harris Dault for spotting this)

Racer Darrell Waltrip endorsing the NASCAR themed Bible

A few posts ago I mentioned my new favorite Bible, the Stock Car Racing Edition. Here's a video endorsement from one of its "contributors." Just remember, you can't go wrong with Jesus on your pit crew.

"Ink & Blood: Dead Sea Scrolls to Gutenburg" coming to JPII High School in Nashville area

John Paul II Catholic High School in Hendersonville, TN will host a traveling exhibition about incunabular (first-generation movable type) printing and ancient manuscripts this Spring.

The exhibit, entitled Ink & Blood, runs from February 15th through March 4th, 2010. The hours are somewhat erratically arranged, and you will need to purchase the $15 tickets in advance (information about both hours and tickets available here)

As the promoters of the exhibit describe:

Ink & Blood: Dead Sea Scrolls to Gutenberg is the largest collection ever assembled chronicling Western Civilization as seen through one of its most prominent and carefully preserved objets d’art—the Hebrew, Latin and English Bible.

The collection includes authentic Dead Sea Scrolls, 5,000-year-old clay tablets, Hebrew Torahs, ancient Greek texts, Medieval Latin manuscripts, pages from Gutenberg’s Bible, and rare English printed Bibles.

In addition to the more than one-hundred authentic artifacts, the exhibition includes a working replica of Gutenberg’s printing press featuring live demonstrations of incunabular printing.

From the information and pictures available on the website, it looks to be a pretty interesting exhibit. I, for one, will be making the pilgrimage to Nashville to explore it. I will have a more detailed review to post then. Meanwhile, if you are in the Nashville area, I highly recommend checking it out for yourself.

Jesus Built my Hot Rod, Redux

A couple of years ago, when I got started analyzing the material aspects of Scripture, it was as a fun continuation of my work in my doctoral dissertation. I wrote the dissertation, in part, as a meditation on The Golfer's Bible, from Holman Christian Bible Publishers. I was intrigued then, as I am today, with the blatant (crass?) melding of American consumer recreation and lifestyle activities with the physical objects we call Bibles.

Now this is not the place to launch into a tirade about these practices. Maybe, in fact, these actions by publishers to make the Bible "more accessible" are not so bad. I have my opinions, obviously, but I will also admit that those opinions have shifted back and forth as I continue this research. So I will let the reader, ultimately, be her own judge on these matters.

But sometimes it gets hard to restrain myself.

So in earlier posts I have also alluded to the Mossy Oak Personal Size Giant Print Bible from Thomas Nelson. I also quoted a little from its introduction in the previous post. I will have more to say, in the coming months, about this particular Bible (it forms part of a chapter in my forthcoming book). For now, I will simply gesture to it again, saying it was a stranger find for me, at first, than the Golfer's Bible. For a long time, it was my favorite example of this phenomenon of "designer Scripture." Moreover, when I tell people what I do, they often respond by asking me, "So what's the best Bible?" or some variant of that question. Because I think that might be the wrong question to ask, for several months the Mossy Oak has been the Bible I recommended [1].

Let us thrust all that to the side, however. Ladies and gentlemen, do not doubt for a moment we cannot push the envelope. We can. Do not doubt for a moment that a Bible can become weirder, more absurd. It can. We can rebuild it. We have the technology. We can make it better. Stronger. Faster.

Ladies and gentleman, start your engines. I give you... The NASCAR Stock Car Racing Edition of the Holy Bible, from Zondervan publishers.

I first saw this Bible in the Memphis BookStar a few weeks before Christmas, and was going to write about it then, but I got distracted by the holidays and then the birth of my daughter. Now Hugh Pyper has written a really good piece analyzing the NASCAR Bible for the SBL Forum.

Read the full text of his column here.

One of the things you notice about the Bible, when leafing through it, is that the "inspirational" portions (which highlight various celebrities on the stock car racing circuit, along with some bromides about the role of various Gospel passages in inspiring them to greatness) are sort of randomly spaced throughout the book, leading to some interesting ideological juxtapositions.

Pyper then points out how these sections, printed as they are on a different paper stock from the "rest" of the Bible, give the Bible a strange tactile feel. He surmises that the publishers did not give much thought to the overall effect of these juxtapositions:

In the end, however, what is most striking about the SCR version is how little interaction there is between the inserts and the text. The full-color glossy inserts contrast with the plain printed texts and tend to be the points at which the Bible falls open. The distribution of the articles appears to be random and mechanical, spaced equally throughout the Old and New Testaments. Although the inserts include some, but surprisingly few, biblical references, they seldom urge the reader to refer to wider passages in the Bible and certainly give no advice on how to tackle the more difficult texts that surround them.

This observation about the materiality of the product is exactly right, as far as I am concerned. When we examine these sorts of Bibles, we should be asking precisely these questions. How does the overall effect, visual, tactile, and ideological, influence the reader's possible reading sof the "bare text"?

At the end, Pyper offers a scathing conclusion: "What this version represents, almost in spite of itself, then, is the relevance of the Bible as symbol in the continuing debate over the nature of American identity, and the irrelevance of much of the Bible as text in that debate."

While I am quite certain, trends being what they are, that this will by no means be the weirdest Bible we shall ever see, it is the current reigning champion. In their race to reach all manner of audiences among the "unchurched," I am waiting for the publishers to come out with versions of Scripture targeted on other popular lifestyle demographics, like the readers of Soldier of Fortune and Penthouse. Though I am usually not one for slippery slopes, given what is on offer already on the bookshelves, I fear we will not have all that long to wait.


[1] I should, and probably will, devote a post in the near future to this phenomenon. I hang out a lot in the Bible sections of bookstores, and it makes sense that the people I run into might be looking for guidance from knowledgeable folks like me or the bookstore clearks to help them choose. But this question also comes up in some stranger settings (like my dissertation defense, for example). I'd like to explore the desire that lives at the heart of readers to have the "right" Bible or the "best" Bible. My short answer, then as now as always, comes back to where I consistently find authority and "rightness" to dwell: not in any Bible itself, but in the institutions and interpretations that surround a given Bible. So, kids, if you want to know the best Bible to read, go ask your priest.


Note: Material Scripture blog is an Amazon Marketplace Affiliate. If you choose to purchase an item through the links in this post, we will receive a modest commission.

Jesus Built my Hot Rod

Gunsights made by Michigan arms manufacturer Trijicon have come under fire in the past few days for their inclusion of Bible verses and references on items sold to the American Military.

There's an article and audio commentary giving an overview of this story here.

Some news sources are describing the inscriptions as "secret Bible codes," which is a little misleading. These inscriptions were certainly not hidden or obscured. For example, anyone with scant biblical knowledge might look at the "JN8:12" marking on the side of the Trijicon ACOG gunsight and at least suspect it to be a New Testament reference.

This issue has added fuel to the ongoing debates surrounding religious freedoms in the military, as well as concerns about the overtones of "holy war" between Christianity and Islam that haunt our current overseas campaigns.

The use of religious inscriptions to mark or "bless" material objects, from gunsights to money, certainly raises some even deeper questions than these, of course.

Then again, where is the bright line between a weapon that sports, say, a reference to 2 Corinthians 4:6 ("For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."), and something like the Mossy Oak Brand Camouflage Bible, which says in its introduction,

Life can be much like learning to hunt. God says in 2 Timothy 2:15, "Be diligent and present yourself approed to God..." Good hunters must become skillful, prepared and diligent. The greatest "hunt" in life is seeking a relationship with the greatest huntsmaster of all, Jesus Christ [p. iii].

Imprimaturs and prooftexts for all sorts of lifestyles of violence, here. Where's Stanley Hauerwas when we need him?

Solar Powered Audio Bibles deployed in Haiti

An evangelical organization known as Faith Comes by Hearing has been getting press in these past weeks because of their involvement in getting a number of solar-powered audio Bibles into Haiti as part of the relief efforts sent in the wake of the earthquakes.

This is certainly not the first audio Bible. There are pocket sized MP3 Bibles like the Go Bible that have been on the market for several years. The solar powered angle, however, is a new and intriguing feature.

The main Bible is known as "The Proclaimer," and their website describes it like this:

We consider the Proclaimer to be a gift from God. Why? Because the inspiration for it came during three days of fasting and prayer by the entire staff of Faith Comes By Hearing. The Proclaimer is a digital player dedicated to playing God's Word in the local heart language.

The organization also sells "BibleSticks" - basically MP3 players that contain files for the audio Bible. They currently are marketing a regular version (in white) and a military version (in black).

There are a couple of stories about this on NPR, one for All Tech Considered, and a short blurb from the business news bloc (which was where I first heard about this).

The organization boasts the world's largest catalog of audio Bibles. In looking over their website, they seem to be scrupulous in not letting on their denominational affiliations (although one can discern a bit of this through their links and partners page).

They offer a fair selection of English versions to choose from (including a New American Bible version, which I found surprising at first), as well as a vast array of "heart languages," which are indigenous dialects from around the globe.

The King James Bible: If It Was Good Enough for Jesus, It's Good Enough for CBS

I was skimming the web for references to "black bonded Bibles" just now -- you know, those staid, traditional, non-flashy and quite sober behemoths of days gone by. Heirloom Bibles of stitched and fragrant Genuine Moroccan Leather. Gift Bibles given and given and given from year to everlasting year. What the President gets sworn in with. You know, those kind of Bibles

I had originally intended this to be a short post about the video I came across, which I have embedded below, where Denzel Washington is discussing his involvement in the 2007 audio Bible, The Bible Experience, which apparently has been a runaway bestseller.



After watching the video, however, I began to read the article, from CBS News Online, accompanying it. And, well. suddenly this post became a little more pointed.

The article is largely about the increasing trend of recent years to publish "designer Bibles," something that I certainly enjoy seeing reported. My trouble with the article, though, concerns several grossly misleading and inaccurate statements made by its author, Caitlin A. Johnson.

Let's take this one, for example, from right at the start of the piece:

In the beginning, there was the King James Bible: 66 books, 1,189 chapters, 31,173 verses — usually bound in sober black leather. The King James Bible was the English language standard for more than 400 years.

Okay. Hold on. Never mind the versions in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, used by the Church for over a millennium. A statement like this also manages to erase the long (and thorny) history of Tyndale, Huss, Luther, the Bishop's Bible, the Geneva Bible, and a host of other lesser-known, but no less influential, predecessors to the King James Version in English.

Now yes, Johnson is partially correct in her characterization of the influence and importance of the King James. If this were the only such statement in the article, and if the article otherwise had carefully-researched claims, I might have let it slide. Not so. Johnson later makes the statement, "For more than 400 years, the King James version was the first — and for many, the only — Bible. "

The first alternative noted in the article does not occur until "September 1966, [when] an alternative was created with today's English version, known as 'Good News for Modern Man,' published by the non-profit American Bible society."

These statements reflect the popular misconceptions surrounding Bible "origins." The notion, as the article asserts, that the Bible has been available for sale "year after year...for 2,000 years" (as Sara Nelson, of Publishers Weekly, claims) is patently untrue. While you can say that commodities that begin to look like what we call a Bible have been part of commerce since before the invention of the movable type press, it is really not until the late 17th century that you can locate the beginnings of "book trade," in the manner that Nelson means.

The last bone of contention I have with the piece comes in response to this:

"It's the best seller of all times," Abyssinian Baptist pastor Dr. Calvin Butts said. "It has to be. It's got everything you would want in a book: sex, violence, intrigue, mystery, the supernatural — it's all here."

The "it has to be" that Dr. Butts asserts is a pretty common sentiment among laypeople in the West. We assume the hegemony of the Bible to be a worldwide phenomenon that simply cannot be touched by any other book.

However, while the Bible is definitely high up there on the list of bestsellers of all time (and the list is, admittedly, a hard one to tabulate - after all, are we talking sales, or copies in print, or...) there is a good chance that another book written in response to a charismatic individual, Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, actually holds the title.

Unfortunately, the historical, exegetical, and political complexities that arise in the wake of this tension between Jesus and Mao seem far beyond the ken of the writers and "newspeople" associated with CBS, who cannot even seem to get the facts about the King James right. Shame.

Denis McQuail's typologies of "media bias"

Denis McQuail, Mass Communication Theory: An Introduction, (London: Sage Publications, 1994)

-----., Media Performance: Mass Communication and the Public Interest, (London: Sage Publications, 1992)

Doron Mendels, The Media Revolution in Early Christianity: An Essay on Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History, (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman's, 1999)

I stumbled across this typology this morning, and it got me thinking, so I thought I would post it, since it seems to speak to some of the matters of "unseen things encoded in Bibles" that I am trying to explore here.

I am quoting a paragraph from Mendels's Media Revolution in Early Christianity (a book worthy of review in its own post - I'll get to that in the coming weeks):

McQuail proceeds to offer a typology of bias that distinguishes two basic variables: "hidden" or "open," on the one hand; and "intended" or "unitended," on the other [McQuail 1992, 193-195]. The cross classification of these two variables yields four main types of non-objective or biased news performance. First, there is partisanship, an open and intended bias that is "normally identified in the structure of news media by its form (editorial leading article, opinion column, forum or access slot, letter, paid adverstisement). In such cases, the convention is to separate partisan from objective sections." Second, there is propaganda, a hidden and intended bias that is "more difficult to deal with, partly because the intention is concealed. It can often occur in the form of objective news, for instance, as information (or 'disinformation') supplied to news media by spokespersons, public relations sources, interest or pressure groups; or 'pseudo-events' staged to gain media coverage or attract an audience.... The most problematic feature of propaganda, defined like this, is the near impossibility of identifying it in the news output in any certain or systematic way." Third, there is unwitting bias, an "open, but unintentional, bias in the selection of topics, events and news angles" that can usually be recognized in "systematic patterns of preferential attention or avoidance which are not justified by any statistical reality, but where there is no reason to suspect propagandist purpose." Fourth, there is ideology, defined as "hidden but unintended bias, embedded in texts" and stemming from the enduring values of the newsmakers themselves [Mendels 1999, 18-19].

Within what might be called American Bible culture, by which I mean not only the books themselves, but Christian bookstores and faith-oriented radio and television stations, as well as many of the political rhetorics that are deployed in campaigns and around various legislative issues, we can certainly see aspect of all four fields of this typology at work. For example, Focus on the Family has this year been engaged in partisanship with regard to retail establishments that they surmise to be sufficiently (or insufficiently) Christmas-honoring. Then again, there are probably those who would want to classify such activities (and in fact all activities of conservative Christians) as nothing but propaganda.

But the question, for me, has less to do with the wider political activities of Christians (at least in this limited case) and more to do with applying this typology specifically to Bibles.

That is to say, what is the best desciptor, in this typology, for the Bibles we are examining here? Are the elements encoded into published Bibles matters of unwitting bias, or of ideology?

I am inclined to think that the demarcation between these two possibilities is not so strict. Instead, perhaps, we see both unwitting bias and ideology at work in the material structure of published Scripture. As more Bibles are explored on this blog, this is a good hypothesis to test.