Today, Sotheby’s will auction a copy of the first English-language book printed in America. “The Whole Booke of Psalmes,” or the Bay Psalm Book, as it is now known, is expected to sell for between fifteen and thirty million dollars, which would make it the most expensive book in the world.
The current record for the highest-priced printed book is not a Gutenberg Bible or a First Folio of Shakespeare but a copy of John James Audubon’s “Birds of America,” which sold for $11.5 million in 2010. The Bay Psalm Book is older and now rarer than Audubon’s catalogue of fowl; only eleven of the original seventeen hundred copies survive.
Translated directly from Hebrew into English, the Bay Psalm Book was printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1640, less than twenty years after the Mayflower left Plymouth, England. It was the first book printed on the Puritan minister Joseph Glover’s press, the first such device to make the journey across the Atlantic. Although Glover died during the 1638 crossing, his widow, Elizabeth, inherited the press and saw to its installation. She established America’s first print shop in a little house on what is now Holyoke Street in Cambridge.
While Stephen Day is generally credited with printing America’s first book, he was only the operator and overseer of Elizabeth Glover’s press. The press was nothing remarkable, and the crude materials and nascent talents of its operators are reflected in the blurred type and typographical inconsistencies in its surviving books, of which the Bay Psalm Book is no exception. Take, for instance, that most essential of words: “PSALM,” which appears that way on the left-hand pages but is spelled “PSALME” on the right-hand pages.
The colonists brought many Psalters with them to the New World, but they quickly found those printings lacking. The hundred and fifty Psalms were divided among “thirty pious and learned Ministers” who labored to produce a verse translation that would be more faithful to the original Hebrew. Their efforts yielded the 1640 version that would become the Bay Psalm Book, which was then revised and reprinted nine times in the seventeenth century alone. The preface to the first edition, the one to be auctioned, states apologetically,
There already one sees the peculiar poetry of erratic spellings and capitalizations that makes the Bay Psalm Book so charming, so authentically early Americana.
Not surprisingly, as it prepared for today’s auction, Sotheby’s has displayed the book with its pages opened to the Twenty-third Psalm. Look to those familiar verses and you can see just how strange the translation is, even relative to the King James Version, which had been completed just thirty years earlier, in 1611:
To my ear, the shepherd is still caring and careful, but those “folds of tender-grasse”? Just down the street from where the Bay Psalm Book was printed is Harvard Yard, itself once a pasture for sheep and cattle. “Green pastures” might well have been most familiar, but the Bay Psalm Book translator’s desire for accuracy is confirmed by the contemporary translation by Robert Alter, himself fiercely dedicated to rescuing the original Hebrew: he chose “grass meadows.”
One can scrutinize every verse of the Bay Psalm Book online. The text rewards such study, but it does not explain why the first book printed in America was a Psalter. Psalters are an unfamiliar genre for many, even those who worship regularly. Psalm-singing had for centuries been the demesne of a hand-picked choir, but the English Reformation invited the voices of the entire congregation. This printing of the Psalms in verse, set to meter, allowed them to be sung by all. Thus the Bay Psalm Book is a kind of hymnal.
Denominations still print original hymnals today, and every new printing marks time and documents tastes. Earlier this year, I interviewed a church organist who was retiring after more than sixty years of service. She did not measure those years in calendrical or liturgical terms, in Christmases, Easters, or even pastors, but hymnals. “I’ve played five different hymnals,” she told me. After she said it, I calculated that my entire life was only three hymnals.
America’s history spans just a few centuries, but hundreds of hymnals. Colonists came seeking religious freedom, so the first book they printed was not a political tract or even a Bible, but a hymnal: a book to be used regularly in communal and even private worship. The intended use of the Bay Psalm Book tells us why it was America’s first book; it also tells us why one of the eleven remaining copies will be sold at Sotheby’s.
Last December, on a Sunday like so many Boston Sundays, one that began in sunshine but gave way to snow showers, three hundred members of Old South Church gathered for a congregational meeting. After hours of debate following weeks of discussion, they voted to sell one of their two copies of the Bay Psalm Book.
The story of that vote can be found on the Old South Web site between “December brings life-changing, death-changing conversations” and “Typhoon Haiyan Relief.” Its placement explains why the Church decided to sell. Just as in 1873, when the congregation divested themselves of their historic Old South Meeting House, the very site that had hosted the debates that led to the Boston Tea Party and where Benjamin Franklin had been baptized, they decided again last year that divestment was necessary.
Reverend Nancy S. Taylor, Old South Church’s senior minister and C.E.O., describes how “members voted in overwhelming numbers to transform treasures into ministry.” At one time, Old South Church owned five copies of the Bay Psalm Book. Now, hoping to fund its ongoing existence, it will be left with just one.
Newspaper headlines on Wednesday will surely list the millions of dollars the Bay Psalm Book sells for, but to understand the sale, one might convert those millions into another currency. Just as centuries can be understood in hymnals, one hymnal’s worth might be better understood as meals and housing for the homeless, literacy programs for new learners and those who speak other languages, after-school programs for youth, or canned goods on food-pantry shelves.
Casey N. Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. You can follow her on Twitter @cncep.
Photograph by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty.
