University of Virginia Library

Introduction

The copyright in the King James translation or Authorised Version of the Bible of 1611 is vested in England in perpetuity in the Crown and delegated thence to the King's Printer (who may change from time to time), and by him it is shared with the learned presses of Oxford and Cambridge Universities. In practice this has meant that only these presses have been entitled to print and sell the King James translation in England.

The privilege has proven a valuable one, but it has been used in different ways by the different presses. For many years, Cambridge printed no Bible at all; at one time Oxford farmed its privilege to London printers; and, at least in 1680, the King's Printer claimed that the learned presses were authorized to print only learned Bibles, i.e., Bibles in folio and quarto sizes.

The situation was complicated by uncertainty as to what constitutes a "Bible"--does the copyright cover separate publications of, say, the New Testament or the Apocrypha or the Pentateuch or digests of the Bible? What is the copyright in Bibles accompanied by learned dissertations or with erudite footnotes or with illustrations?

Of course, the English patent of 1611 did not extend to Holland or Scotland or Ireland. Printers in Scotland before the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707 and in Ireland before the Act of Union with Ireland in 1800 were perfectly entitled to print the Authorized Version without reference to the Crown copyright--but, since the conventions largely concerned printing, there was some uncertainty as to whether they could sell them in the vastly more lucrative market in England.

The Bible was, of course, an extremely valuable commodity to printers and booksellers, since every Protestant church and family needed to have its own copy. Speculators were sorely tempted to share in these profits, and some wonderfully ingenious methods were devised for doing so. A commentary on the Bible or a suite of engraved illustrations for the Bible would profit from the popularity of the Bible--and it might sell even better if it were actually attached to a Bible.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, printers and publishers developed

two chief methods to share in the highly profitable monopoly on Bible production in England: (1) Add material that would make the work something beyond a simple Bible, and (2) Print the Authorized Version outside England, in Holland or Dublin or Edinburgh, and sell copies in England.

The illustration of Bibles is particularly interesting in this respect.[1] In general, the King's Printer and the Learned Presses did not print illustrated Bibles, though John Field at Cambridge printed a splendid one in 1659-60, and John Baskett created another at Oxford in 1716-17.[2] From 1659, beginning in Amsterdam and spreading to London and thence to the provinces, suites of Bible illustrations without type-set text were published by speculators for English readers. These were designed to be combined with Bibles printed by the patent-holders--Boydell's Illustrations of Holy Writ (1813) claimed on the titlepage that it was "Calculated to Ornament All Quarto and Octavo Editions of the Bible, and Sold in Parts without The Text".

When no legal impediment was raised to this practise, speculators began in 1688 to issue illustrated works called The History of the Old and New Testament which summarized or even incorporated those parts of the Bible represented in the designs. Eventually, they found that they could publish with impunity annotated and illustrated editions of the Bible, so long as the titles were something other than "The Holy Bible", such as The Family Companion or Annotations upon the Holy Bible (1739) and The Christian's New, Complete, and Universal Family Bible (1794). As "John Reeves, Esq. One of the Patentees of the Office of King's Printer" explained in 1802: "all our authorized Bibles, published by the King's printer, and the Universities, are wholly without explanatory notes. These privileged persons have confined themselves to reprinting the bare text, in which they have an exclusive right; forbearing to publish it with notes, which, it is deemed, may be done by any of the King's subjects as well as themselves."[3] When Thomas Macklin proposed in 1790 to publish an enormously ambitious illustrated Bible, he cautiously requested from Oxford "the use of their privilege", implying that

it would be worth to him "a large Consideration . . . But the Delegates, not thinking themselves warranted to grant the Privilege whether with, or without compensation, . . . Macklin had recourse (for Security) to the printing . . . Notes . . . at the Foot of the page."[4]

However, even the practise of permitting anyone to print the King James translation of the Bible with notes was subject to devious abuse. In 1776 J.W. Pasham printed a curiously-tall duodecimo edition of The Holy Bible with five lines or 3/8 of "NOTES" at the foot of each leaf, thus conforming to the convention of printing with notes. However, as John Reeves complained, "the notes are placed purposely so as to be cut off by the binder".[5] Such deviousness was not confined to the lesser breeds without the patent. A century earlier the London patent holders had complained that the printers "at Oxford . . . print a Bible in Quarto; and so order it that the Marginal Notes in some of the Copies being left out, if in those the Margin be cut close away, they will not be much larger than a large octavo (and these be those which the London printers complain of as being pretended to be Quartos but being really octavos)[.]"[6]