A Passion for Books

by Harold Rabinowitz

  Within the tormented maze of the U.S. Postal Service regulations was born the rumor that strapping tape had become obligatory, rendering each envelope impervious to mechanical attack. All fourth-class mail, the lifeblood of an educated citizenry, now traveled back and forth unopenable. Drifts of fluff reached knee-high into the Rockies. The president and his joint security chiefs had themselves shipped to Bimini via UPS, and over the radio rustling, muffled spokesthings declared the country to be sixty percent recycled fibers and entirely under the rule of a tan, pre-stamped junta, in a variety of handy sizes.

  Somewhere near the dotted Mason-Dixon Line, the last human voice expired, crying, “Pull here!”

  Let your bookcases and your shelves be your gardens and your pleasure-grounds. Pluck the fruit that grows therein, gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh. If your soul be satiate and weary, change from garden to garden, from furrow to furrow, from sight to sight. Then will your desire renew itself and your soul be satisfied with delight.

  —JUDAH IBN TIBBON

  “It’s $37.50 until December 31. Thereafter $50.00, and to some people we might not sell it at any price.” © 1988 by Eldon Dedini, reprinted by permission of Sam Gross.

  My Friends

  BY PETRARCH

  I have friends, whose society is extremely agreeable to me: they are of all ages, and of every country. They have distinguished themselves both in the cabinet and in the field, and obtained high honors for their knowledge of the sciences. It is easy to gain access to them; for they are always at my service, and I admit them to my company, and dismiss them from it, whenever I please. They are never troublesome, but immediately answer every question I ask them. Some relate to me the events of past ages, while others reveal to me the secrets of nature. Some, by their vivacity, drive away my cares and exhilarate my spirits, while others give fortitude to my mind, and teach me the important lesson how to restrain my desires, and to depend wholly on myself. They open to me, in short, the various avenues of all the arts and sciences, and upon their information I safely rely, in all emergencies. In return for all these services, they only ask me to accommodate them with a convenient chamber in some corner of my humble habitation, where they may repose in peace: for these friends are more delighted by the tranquillity of retirement, than by the tumults of society.

  Norman Mailer’s Ten Favorite American Novels

  U.S.A., John Dos Passos

  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

  Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

  The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

  Studs Lonigan, James T. Farrell

  The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

  The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

  Appointment in Samarra, John O’Hara

  The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain

  Moby-Dick, Herman Melville

  W. Somerset Maugham’s Ten Greatest Novels

  In 1948 the British novelist wrote Great Novelists and Their Novels, which contained the following list of what he considered the ten greatest novels ever written. He acknowledged in the introductory essay that “to talk of the ten best novels in the world is to talk nonsense,” but he went on to analyze what made these novels great in a short essay that became required reading for any would-be novelist. It is di ficult to believe that anyone embarking on reading these ten books would not come out of the experience a changed person.

  Tom Jones, Henry Fielding

  Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

  The Red and the Black, Stendhal

  Old Man Goriot, Honoré de Balzac

  David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

  Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

  Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

  Moby-Dick, Herman Melville

  War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

  The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

  The Bible Through the Ages

  BY BEN D. ZEVIN

  Ben Zevin was the president of World Publishing, a fine general-interest publisher and the largest Bible publishing house in the world. He was a lifelong student of the history of the Bible and Bible publishing. This talk was given in 1955 to the Rowfant Club, Cleveland’s celebrated bibliophilicsociety, and included in William Targ’s fine 1955 collection, Bouillabaisse for Bibliophiles.

  Until quite recently, as time is measured, it was dangerous to have anything at all to do with publishing the Bible. Heresy might lurk in the phrasing of a marginal gloss or, worse, in a typographical error inadvertently left uncorrected in the published book. The biographies of those connected with the early history of the English Bible—printers, translators, sponsors—are rare which do not end suddenly in martyrdom at the stake or tell of long periods spent in the prisons of the Lancastrian or Tudor kings. John Wycliffe, first of the giants among the translators of the Bible into English, did manage to die of natural illness, suffering a fatal stroke in his sixties; but in 1428 his bones were dug from the consecrated ground in which they had lain for nearly half a century and were burned and scattered on the waters of the river Swift. In the less vindictive era of the Stuarts two centuries later, the printers who permitted an edition of the Bible to pass through their hands with Psalm xiv beginning “The fool hath said in his heart there is a God” got off merely with having the entire edition confiscated and the imposition of a fine of £3,000, no mean sum even today.

  But time works great changes. Long gone are the surreptitious days when a Tyndale must flee from England to Hamburg, from Hamburg to Cologne, from Cologne to Worms with his translation or with a few salvaged printed sheets, when plans must be made to hide the printed edition in sacks of grain to be smuggled across the Channel. The accent in supervision of the press has shifted from orthodoxy in religion to orthodoxy in morals (and, in some parts of the world, in politics), and the Bible today has greater relative freedom of circulation than it has ever known. More Bibles are in circulation now than at any previous time, and as always there are never enough.

  The compulsion to circulate ever more and finer Bibles is irresistible. Everyone who deals with the Bible understands that. The minister in the pulpit, the theologian in his study, the professor in the seminary—they grasp it instantly. So do those whose contribution in widening the influence of the Bible is on a different plane— the printer at the case, the colporteur, the bookseller, the bibliophile, the publisher. The Bible gives rise to a universal hunger in those who work with it: to improve it, to make it finer, to bring the physical thing—word, phrase, book itself—nearer to its spiritual content.

  That feeling—an emotion comparable to the one motivating the great artists, the composers, the creators in any field—springs from the Bible itself. The painter visualizing a Madonna, the sculptor liberating from a block of stone one of the heroic Old Testament figures, the musician seeking sweet melody and new harmony to match the words of a psalm—these are moved to creation by realization of the Bible’s own nature. They draw, and have drawn, inspiration from the Bible, a book that has been made known to them more intimately by printing. The process is a continuing one. It works deeply on all who read the Bible, and, perhaps, most deeply on those whose vocation stems directly from the Bible. It is no accident, no wonder, that the Bible stands as the first printed book, the best printed book, the most printed book. It is not chance that makes the Bible the book most translated, most sold, most given away. No outward pressure has been necessary in making it the most widely read and most often read book.

  Historians and scholars are in agreement that the Bible has saved the Jews from extinction or assimilation. The Jews had been a long time writing it. More than five hundred years went into the fashioning of Genesis. The Prophets were active in the centuries when the kingdoms of Israel and Judah flourished. In the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., their work culminated in the stirring messages immortalized in the books of the greatest of them. These men left their distinctive mark in the Bible, a way of thought and expression that has influence
d philosophers and writers ever since. As their greatest achievement, they established the monotheistic definition which distinguished first Judaism, then Christianity. Amos, Hosea, Isaiah—these and their like conceived the oneness of God and His perfection. From them came the moral ideas that make the Bible supreme among the works guiding man’s conduct.

  The writing of the Old Testament took perhaps a thousand years. Writing the New Testament took about fifty years, principally in the last half of the first century A.D. All came down through the years in Greek, for in the third century B.C. a group of Jewish scholars at Alexandria, seventy-two according to tradition, had translated the Old Testament into Greek. This version, known as the Septuagint, formed the base from which all later versions of the Christian Bible derived. The name Bible, itself, originally meaning in Greek “the books, the writings,” came to mean “the Book, the Scriptures.”

  The authorship of the New Testament is better defined than that of the Old Testament. The authors of the latter were anonymous, writing for no other reason than to preserve the traditions and the way of life of a people proud in its knowledge. Authorship was not definitely ascribed. It therefore came about that the portions of the Law were attributed to Moses, the Psalms to David, the Proverbs to Solomon, all heroes of national tradition. But more definitely, rather than less, the authorship of much in the New Testament is ascribed to Paul. So, too, with the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, though biblical scholars are not as sure of all portions of these books as they are of the Pauline Epistles. However, the writers and rewriters are fairly well recognized by biblical historians; the anonymity of Old Testament writings is not characteristic of the New Testament.

  Until some three hundred years after the birth of Christ, there was no assurance that both Testaments would be included in the Bible. The moot point was the Old Testament emphasis on monotheism. Origen, a Christian leader of the third century, more than any other individual swung the weight of Christian opinion toward maintenance of the monotheism conceived by the writers of the Old Testament. Thereafter no thought of abandoning it arose.

  In the second half of the fourth century, there began the first authoritative translation of the Bible into a language other than Hebrew and Greek. This was the Latin translation by Jerome. There had been an earlier anonymous translation into Latin, but with much variation among its copies. Jerome’s was a masterwork, commissioned by Pope Damasus I, whose secretary he had been. It took fifteen years before the translation was completed in 405. It became known as the Vulgate, though apparently this name was not applied to it until the thirteenth century, when Roger Bacon used the term. Jerome was a thorough scholar who took the hard way to achievement. For his translation of the Old Testament he went to Hebrew, the language from which the Septuagint had derived.

  The Vulgate met a mixed reception. Some of Jerome’s scholarly contemporaries did not like his rendering of certain passages. They were all for literality; he had proceeded in the path deemed best by subsequent translators, hewing to the meaning rather than the literal translation. Jerome was long dead before the Vulgate was in general favor, which did not come for the better part of two centuries. But once acceptance came, it was effective; for a thousand years the Vulgate was the one Bible available to the peoples of Western Europe.

  They came to revere it, but one could hardly say they knew it. Under the circumstances then existing, that was impossible. Every copy of the Bible had literally to be copied by hand. Beautiful copies were made, but production in quantity was simply not possible. Though copying, illuminating, and other duties involved in the preparation of manuscript copies became the lifework of many people connected with monasteries and universities, supply never could catch up with need. Nevertheless, the admiration, or, better, adoration, of the Bible caused its contents to become more or less familiar; in all lands, peoples became acquainted in their own language with parts of the Bible if not the whole. In England, Caedmon, Cynewulf, Bede, Alfred, Aelfric, and Orm stand out as translators or paraphrasers of parts of the Bible; later the miracle and mystery plays were to bring alive the biblical stories and characters in the colloquial language of the people.

  What each nation needed was a scholar to make a complete translation, a scholar like Jerome. But only from the Church and through Church training could such scholars come, and as the Church grew powerful, the leaders at Rome were less inclined to favor uninstructed reading of the Bible. In consequence, popular yearning for the Bible was met along other avenues, notably by means of the arts, especially the drama. These were to serve until the spread of printing from movable type coincided with the Reformation at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth.

  Prior to Gutenberg’s invention, there had been no great progress made in bringing the Bible into English, in spite of considerable efforts. The ninth-century endeavors in Anglo-Saxon were partial and incomplete. John Wycliffe in the fourteenth century had greater success. He was more than a scholar; he was, as has been said of him, an ecclesiastical statesman. A philosopher and theologian, he was an acknowledged leader among his contemporaries at Oxford. In the sense in which the word was used in the Reformation, Wycliffe was a reformer; his ideas were very much those preached by John Huss, who, thirty years after Wycliffe’s death, died at the stake in Prague for heresy. Wycliffe, perhaps, was fortunate in being among the first of the translators.

  Some at least of the Wycliffe English translation of the Bible was done by an aide, Nicholas Hereford, and four years after Wycliffe’s death the whole work was revised by another, probably John Purvey, who also had been his aide. The Wycliffe Bible was for a hundred years the only English translation. The reform movement of which Wycliffe was the forerunner spread throughout England in the years that followed his death. And despite the forcible suppression of the Lollards, as the followers of the movement were called, well over 150 manuscripts of Wycliffe’s Bible still survive.

  The half century from 1450 to 1500 saw the invention and spread of printing from movable type. It was in this period also that the Byzantine empire fell, and with the taking of Constantinople in 1453 there came into Western Europe a flood of scholars from the East, men versed in Hebrew and Greek, carrying with them manuscripts invaluable to biblical scholarship. Students in Western Europe suddenly were granted the vision of new horizons, and there arose the scholarly aspect of that revolution in outlook we call the Renaissance, the “New Learning” that came to digest more fully the meat on which the Scholastics had chewed so long—and so vainly.

  Properly enough, the first “book” resulting from the invention of printing was a Bible, the forty-two-line edition of the Vulgate prepared by Johann Gutenberg at Mainz sometime before 1456. There may perhaps have been as many as three hundred copies printed of this masterpiece, esteemed by admirers of the printed word as the most beautiful book ever printed, a work in which printing seems to spring fully perfected from nothingness in one magnificent leap. 1 Forty-six copies only have survived of the two-column folio, only twenty-one of them complete, some on vellum, some on paper; thirteen are in the United States, and of them only five are perfect. The story of the resurrection of the Gutenberg Bible, after François Guillaume de Bure recognized its importance when he came upon a copy in 1763 in the Mazarin library, is however not a part of the history of the Bible in English and must be passed over here.

  But Gutenberg’s Bible was the first, and others followed. During the half century from 1450 to 1500, some 130 separate editions were published. In 1466 the first Bible in a modern tongue, German, was issued; before the turn of the century the Hebrew Bible had been printed; in 1516 the Greek New Testament of Erasmus was issued at Basle. A new era was in sight, not only for scholars, but for all the people as well.

  The William Tyndale Bible, the basis of today’s Bible in the English language, cost its producer his life. The Reformation was in full swing, but the new orientation was still too new to save Tyndale. Tyndale was publicly executed as a he
retic, as Huss had been a century earlier.

  Like Wycliffe, Tyndale was a scholar, though in no sense as renowned a figure. Whereas Wycliffe had many other interests, Tyndale had virtually a single objective, and that was to put the Bible within popular reach. In his hopeful days, talking to a theologian, he said: “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the scripture than thou dost.”

  Tyndale’s encouragement came only from layfolk; in clerical and official circles he was discouraged. Finally he realized that if he were to bring out a Bible for all to read, he could not do it in England. He went to Germany, where, after completing his translation of the New Testament and being forced to move hurriedly with what sheets had already been printed, he published a scholarly if tendentious New Testament in 1526. To this he added the Pentateuch in 1530 and the Book of Jonah in 1531, issuing his final revision of the text in 1535. The influence of Tyndale’s Bible has been immeasurable. It has been said that 80 percent of the language of our English Bible is still Tyndale’s.

  Tyndale was doubly unfortunate; not only had he opposed the leading ecclesiastics, but he had offended Henry VIII, and that probably was why the king let events take their course. Arrested in Belgium, Tyndale was condemned as a heretic, strangled, and burned at the stake. At his martyrdom, Tyndale prayed, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.”

  While he was in prison prior to his execution, Tyndale became a Hebrew scholar. But the Old Testament was not in his thoughts when he first decided upon translating the Bible; his whole zeal was in providing his fellow countrymen with an English version of the New Testament. His main sources were the Greek text by Erasmus and Martin Luther’s German translation, which itself stemmed from Erasmus. These two versions preceded Tyndale’s by only a few years, Erasmus’s in 1516, Luther’s in 1522.