What, Exactly, Is A Reader’s Bible?
If you haven’t read my three-part series on Bible design genres, start there. In this piece, I take one of the newly emerging genres, the Reader’s Bible, and ask what it is, exactly, that sets it apart from other editions.
If you’re really into genre discussions, you know that one of the great pleasures is quibbling over the borders. Writers hate this kind of thing. As a rule, we want as many people as possible to read our work. When marketing types ask who this book was written for, or what category it should be shelved in, the writer in me replies disdainfully: It is for the world. Shelve it with the other timeless works of genius. But ‘works of genius’ is apparently not one of the options in Amazon’s pull-down menu. My promise to you now is that this is the last time I’ll pontificate from the writer’s point of view. I am removing my novelist’s mitre and replacing it with the common beret of the fanboy. Because when it comes to the printed Bible, I am a passionate amateur, and I have come here to quibble over trivialities.
There are a lot of different editions representing themselves as Reader’s Bibles. In one sense, if the publisher calls it that, then I guess that’s what it is. But we have enough examples at this point to start thinking more critically about what is — and isn’t — a Reader’s Bible.
For example, as I pointed out in my series on design genres, a good typographer can do a lot to make any genre more readable. If we say that any readable Bible is a Reader’s Bible, the term will quickly lose any helpful meaning. Over the years I have helped my father source several large-print Bibles. The worse his vision gets, the larger type he wants, and now that I’m in my fifties and enjoying the mysteries of so-called progressive lenses, I have more sympathy than ever before for this bigger-is-better mindset. But the last term I would use to describe the giant paperback KJV we discovered together at Half Price Books is Reader’s Bible, because in every respect but the type size it was profoundly unreadable.
You get the point. There has to be some kind of criteria we can apply to say, yes, this is a Reader’s Bible of some kind, whereas that — readable though it may be — is not. In fact, I believe there is a line we can draw, a quite simple one. Everyone on one side of the line qualifies, and everything on the other is something else. So let me tell you where that line is, then give you an example that falls on one side, and an example that falls on the other.
First, the criteria. To me, it’s as simple as this. A Reader’s Bible, by definition, presents its paragraphed, single column text without the intrusion of verse numbers. That last part is the key. I think a Reader’s Bible must have a paragraphed text, and it must be in a single column, but many editions which have these features would not qualify as Reader’s Bibles. If it has verse numbers in the text, then it’s something else.
The best example of this rule at work would be what I consider the most conservative iteration of the Reader’s Bible, and arguably the first of the modern era: Crossway’s ESV Reader’s Bible. Why ‘conservative’? Because of what it doesn’t omit. There are still numbered chapter breaks, and still a running header with the reference range for the page. Turn at random to a page — let’s choose p. 1462 — and you’ll find in the header that the text on the page consists of Matthew 9.1-25. There’s a red ‘9’ in the margin at the beginning of the chapter, too. If you happened to be using this Reader’s Bible in church and someone said, “Turn to Matthew 9.34,” you could at least find the page you need, and even guess what part of the page. A more thoroughgoing example of the genre wouldn’t give you that chapter number, and might not even give you the header. So like I say, conservative. But one thing the most conservative Reader’s Bible doesn’t have is verse numbers in the text.
Now, some editions have the numbers, but move them to the margin. The old NEB did this, and back in the early 2000s the ground-breaking Message Remix followed suit. More recently, the Schuyler Treveris takes this approach. Do these qualify as Reader’s Bibles, according to my criteria? The answer is probably not, but I can’t make up my mind, and it probably doesn’t matter. I don’t want to strain out gnats here.
But I’m not averse to swallowing a camel if I have to. Let me cite an example of something that definitely doesn’t fit my criteria, but demonstrates how tricky this genre thing can be: another Crossway design, the Legacy. This beautiful layout could stake a claim to several genres at once. It provides as much space in the margin as most Wide Margin (or, for that matter, Journaling) Bibles, and could certainly be used in either capacity — and with greater utility than a lot of editions in those categories. Still, I don’t quite think of it as a Wide Margin Bible, or a Journaling Bible. It’s something else. Could it be a Reader’s Bible? The Legacy features a single column, paragraphed text and no cross references, meaning that at a glance many people would say it must be a Reader’s Bible. And you know what? It’s very readable. The classic proportions of that layout are easy on the eyes, a pleasure to hold and to peruse. But no, it’s not a Reader’s Bible, either, because it has those pesky superscript verse numbers in the text.
This isn’t a criticism, by the way. Think how perfect the Legacy is for anyone who can’t decide between a Wide Margin or Journaling Bible or a Reader’s Bible, someone who wants to have it all! Basically, the Legacy can be all of those things at once — at least to a degree. Just as some stories fit neatly within genre conventions while others defy or bend them, modern Bibles sometimes fit, sometimes defy, and sometimes bend our categories. This fruitful variability is yet another sign that we are in a moment of great creativity and innovation.
For me, though, the verse numbers are the key to the genre. Taking them out doesn’t automatically produce a Reader’s Bible, and yet you cannot have one if you leave them in.
