Brave New Formats: Genres, Part 3
This is the third part of a series of reflections on the various “genres” of Bible design. After conceding that a lot of the progress in recent Bible publishing has come through a reinvigoration of the old formats rather than a revolution, I turn my attention to the exciting, unpredictable world of emerging new genres.
Whenever I encounter an Everyman’s Library hardcover on a used bookstore shelf — whatever the edition, whomever the author — a terrible inner dilemma ensues: should I purchase the book, or walk out with the hollow feeling that always accompanies the triumph of thrift over desire. At least, that’s how I’ve felt on the exceedingly rare occasions when I’ve allowed desire to lose the argument, which is why I’ve mostly resolved not to do that anymore. As a result, I have a bulging shelf of these books in their more-or-less matching dustjackets, including several duplicates because I don’t keep good track of what I already have.
One of them is Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Cambridge Lectures, which excerpts a number of essays from longer works. My favorite of these, it won’t surprise you to learn, is a piece called “On Reading the Bible,” taken from On the Art of Reading (1920). He criticizes the way Bibles have been designed in terms that would be familiar to any of my readers. Poetry is printed as prose, and prose “broken up into short verses, so that they resemble the little passages set out for parsing or analysis in an examination paper.” This, he thinks, is “the deadliest invention of all for robbing the book of outward resemblance to literature and converting it to the aspect of a gazetteer.” Sound familiar? It’s the same point I make in saying the Bibles of old looked more like dictionaries for looking things up than prose works for deep reading. Quiller-Couch goes on to criticize the “italics and numerals,” the “double columns, with a marginal gutter on either side, each gutter pouring down an inky flow of references and cross references.”
With just “the simplest alterations,” he insists, the situation can be dramatically improved. Even by today’s standards, however, his simple alternatives are daring. First, he suggests rearranging the books, putting them “in their right order” as opposed to the canonical one. I believe he intends the order of their composition here, though I can’t be certain. Next, he says: “I should print the prose continuously, as prose is ordinarily and properly printed: and the poetry in verse lines, as poetry is ordinarily and properly printed. And I should print each on a page of one column, with none but the necessary notes and references, and these so arranged that they did not tease and distract the eye.” Amen to that. Finally, he wants poetry to be formatted with a consciousness of strophe and anti-strophe reflecting its musical form, which would require a collaboration between translators, interpreters, and designers that even today is far from the norm.
Throughout the twentieth century, there are efforts along these lines, attempts to design the Bible in a way that re-situates it as a book intended for reading. I will throw out just a handful of examples. The 1930s gave us The Aldine Bible, edited by M. R. James (better known for his impeccable ghost stories, which I re-read every October) with engravings by Eric Gill, as well as Simon and Schuster’s The Bible Designed to be Read as Living Literature, edited by Ernest Sutherland Bates. In the 1960s, The Shorter Oxford Bible, an abridgment, and the Nonsuch Press three-volume KJV are both elegantly designed. When the New English Bible was published, one of the design ambitions was to produce a more readable, novel-like layout, though sadly it didn’t catch on. But there were glimmers down to the modern day. Cambridge University Press in the mid-1990s printed a REB New Testament with a single column, paragraphed format, and I still use it. In fact, it was this edition that introduced me to the practice — an affectation, you might say — of substituting a point or dot in place of the traditional colon in Scripture references. Instead of writing John 3:16, for example, this edition would reference John 3.16, and I follow that practice in my writing.
Even so, these editions are merely harbingers. I don’t think that, even taken together, they constitute a genre, though of course we might retroactively reclare them all to be Reader’s Bibles of one kind or another. But to me a series of occasional one-offs does not a genre make. If every ten or fifteen years someone writes another story with a cowboy in it, I’m not ready to declare that there’s a western genre. But if they start appearing often enough to notice similarities, to start asking ourselves what makes a good cowboy story or a bad one, then the trend has coalesced into a recognizable form. Until then, we just have a bunch of specialty items.
This is a long-winded way of making a relatively simple point. I’ve already suggested in this series that the reinvigoration of classic genres is a tell-tale sign that we have entered a new age of creativity when it comes to Bible publishing. A more important marker, in my mind, is the emergence of new genres. Specifically, the way that in the past decade certain types of Bible which in the past would have been specialty items, doomed to appeal only to a select few, have now become if not mainstream at least more widely available than ever before.
I want to be conservative in citing examples, because my intention is to identify genres that I believe might just stick around. Your social media feed might bristle with innovations of every conceivable kind — it’s an exciting moment to be interest in Bible publishing — but I suspect many of these hothouse flowers will not stand the test of time. The following, I suspect, just might:
The Journaling Bible, an updated form of the Wide Margin, often with text only instead of a reference layout, intended for writing, drawing, and various other creative means of “illuminating” the page.
The Reader’s Bible, channeling Quiller-Crouch (and, I’d like to think, Bertrand), a text-only layout designed for deep reading, formatted like a prose work rather than a reference book.
My friend Klaus Krogh of 2K/Denmark fame has convinced me that there is another category with enough modern examples now to constitute a genre:
The Illustrated Bible, incorporating artwork into the layout to enhance the reading experience. Some draw on newly commissioned art and others use historical works.
There is a lot more to be said about these genres, but I’ve said a lot already and my hope is to make this series a bit less digressive than my mind tends to be. So let’s put a marker down: in future features, I will dig deeper into emerging genres and try to get a better understanding of what makes them tick, and why I think these may have staying power that others don’t.
For now, reflect on this. One aspect of a revolution is the way that a bunch of past revolutionaries who’d been written off as crazies suddenly enter the pantheon of mainstream adoration. It’s the same thing that happens when your favorite band that no one else liked back in the day has a song go viral after being included in a soundtrack. Suddenly, everybody’s always loved them. With Reader’s Bibles, at least, I think that’s beginning to happen. Publishing a Bible without all the traditional apparatus sounded crazy not long ago, and now everybody’s doing it. That, my friend, is evidence that what we’ve experienced is more than reformation. It’s revolution, too.
