Blasphemous Bible – Three Little Letters

A Bible is being sold at Bonhams of London on 11/11/15, it’s a nice Bible, an old Bible, almost 400 years old but £15,000? What is it that makes this Bible so valuable?

It was published in 1631 by Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, the Royal printers. It wasn’t anything special then, not an anniversary edition, not a jewel encrusted, gold leaf illuminated item of great beauty, it was just a Bible.

All was well for the first year and a thousand copies had been printed before a small mistake was noticed, three letters were missing and those three letters had the country’s Anglicans in uproar.

You see those three little letters had a huge impact on the message of the Bible. They made up a little word, a word that wouldn’t cause so much as a ripple were it to be thrown alone into the public domain; the trouble was it missing from a Biblical instruction.

That instruction came in the form of a  Commandment; the Seventh Commandment to be exact and those three little letters that were missing from the Bible were the ones that made up the word ‘not’, so instead of being commanded Thou shalt not commit adultery as was right and proper, 17th century England was being told to go off and fornicate with whomsoever they pleased.

King Charles I was enraged when he discovered the faux pas and demanded that the Bibles be withdrawn and all of them burned, but as with almost everything that is ordered to be destroyed, a few somehow escaped.
The King also removed  Barker and Lucas’ printing licence and fined them £300, which equates to around £40,000 in today’s money.

It is not known whether the misprint was a genuine mistake or a purposeful act of sabotage but either way the result was nationwide horror and a terminal disaster for the publishers.

Barker never recovered from the scandal and he was jailed in 1635 after amassing enormous debts. A decade and numerous jail stays later and Barker was dead, a broken man and all because of three little letters.

The Archbishop of Canterbury at the time of the scandal, George Abbot, wrote:

“I knew the tyme (sic) when great care was had about printing, the Bibles especially, good compositors and the best correctors were gotten being grave and learned men, the paper and the letter rare, and faire every way of the beste, but now the paper is nought, the composers boyes, and the correctors unlearned.”

There are thought to be only nine of these misprinted Bibles left in existence today and whilst they caused outrage when the mistake was first found, they are now considered an important part of print history, not to mention a rather humorous reminder that Proof Reading is an important part of producing a book.

It will be fascinating to see just how much those three little letters are worth.