2020

For this year, Anno Domini 2020 I chose a screenshot of the way the Bible appears in this cyber era. This is an evangelical Protestant site where one can find many Bible translations and also a search box. I noticed that the default translation is the King James version. In the post on the 60s I noted that this translation was the translation for the English-speaking world, even to influencing Catholic Bibles from the 18th century into the present day.

If you click on the translation tab you will find 219 translations. The greatest number are in English, some 60 versions,  but Chinese translations are very common too. These perhaps reflect the long history of missionary work in China.  I don’t know how these statistics compare to other religions, but the numbers printed, distributed and translated into many languages and often several translations into one language is surely remarkable.

I think the early division of Christianity into east and west and also into fragments especially in the east in early days and later the fissiparous Protestant churches has meant there has never been a single official Bible from which all translations flow.  The Bible is actually a compilation of books written at different times and places and wedded together into one volume. I suppose one could see Christianity as a living coloured mosaic that has been added to and altered at different times. Or as something like white light which is in actuality all the colours of the visible spectrum merged. It may look like one but is many, joined.

Post Scriptum:  I was determined to work the word fissiparous into one of these blog posts!

And I made it before midnight eastern time and thus before the end of the 12th day of Christmas.

the 60s

In this blog post I decided to combine two 1960s style Bibles here:  one is a peculiar sort of Bible and very Protestant; the other is a standard text Bible, but deliberately Catholic.

First the 1960 Gideon New Testament, with Psalms and Proverbs. The Gideons are a group I did not know much about until I began this blog post. The Bible shown above was given to me in Grade 5 in 1960. As I recall (dimly), two men wearing brown suits came into the class, were welcomed by our teacher and spent a few minutes preaching casually, then handed out free copies as above. The Gideons (taking their name from an Old Testament figure) were formed in 1899 by two travelling salesmen in Wisconsin. According to that reliable source, Wikipedia, this group today gives away on average two Bibles per second and has distributed roughly 2 billion since they began this practice in 1908. To be a Gideon you must be male, over 21 and in a sales or professional occupation – and, most importantly a member in good standing of an evangelical Protestant church.

This idea of religion in a public school system comes up in my teaching when students here in Ontario, Canada begin to note that only Catholics have publicly funded religious schools. I can then tell them that the ‘public’ schools in Ontario were at one time ‘Protestant’  schools and publicly funded. I have personal memories of daily Bible readings, saying the Lord’s Prayer (the ‘Our Father’ to Catholics) as part of opening excercises, a general assent to Christianity from teachers, and occasional visits in class time from a local Protestant minister. And of course, the receipt of free Bibles from the Gideons.

George Grant has a good essay on the degree to which these public/Protestant schools actually assented to Christianity in the early 60s. The essay can be found in a collection of his essays, Technology and Empire (1969). The particular essay, Religion and the State, was first published in Queen’s Quarterly in 1963. The 1969 reprint has a new introduction by Grant where he critically analyzes his own earlier thinking. In general he states that the true religion of public schools was consumerism and that only lip service was paid to Protestant Christianity.  Judging by my own 1960 experience, I am not sure his assessment was entirely accurate, unless of course I was personally more attuned to faith and the message received from curriculum and teachers and Gideons than most. This inclusion of a basic, Protestant Christianity in schools was a product of the attitudes and mind of Egerton Ryerson in the 19th century. Ryerson, like Sir John A. MacDonald, has been cast from the firmament of national worship because of their ideas on indigenous education, as has the place of religion in these formerly Protestant schools.

I have also alway been curious why these gift Bibles only include the Psalms and Proverbs from the Old Testament. I have no answer, just the question.

The second Bible pictured above was published in 1966 using a 1946 updated translation originally from 1611. This is a Catholic Bible and the interesting point here is that it is not based on the first Catholic Bible English translation, but the King James Anglican version that became ‘the’ Bible for English-speaking Protestants and is still so for many today. The original Douay-Rheims Bible has a complex publication history which I won’t go into here as that would require a long article on its own. But, in the 18th century another entirely different Catholic English translation was produced in England that was based on the King James Anglican translation. It was translated so as to ensure it matched the last Latin Bible and did not conflict with Catholic theology. This 1966 Bible is in that tradition which also has a complex publication history. Like the family Bibles I described earlier in this series of blog posts, it contains explanatory notes, especially for the Old Testament indicating it is meant to be used as a study Bible. This too is new for Catholicism. The existence of English translations was part of the Catholic Reformation that followed the Protestant – sometimes called the Counter Reformation as it was seen at one time as a reaction to the Protestant reform. To some degree it was, but reform had been bubbling under the surface before Martin Luther. But what is new here for Catholics is Bible study and a Study Bible.

Both these Bibles show a Christian world in the 1960s that saw Bibles as sources of intellectual study – a type of science of the Bible, or Godly science. Given the state of Christianity in the contemporary world I think it obvious that this attempt to study the Bible as one would study Biology or Physics did not achieve positive results. I am currently struggling with Charles Taylor’s philosophical works on ‘secularism’ and his ideas such as ‘authenticity’ and ‘individuation’ as factors in the change if not the decline in Christian belief in the western world. More on this in the final installment of this series.

1954

At this point, I leap into the mid 20th century. This Bible is the same size as the 1899 Bible and the original owner, my elder brother the same age, nine, as my grandfather when he received his Bible in 1899. There are differences, however. This Bible, as was common in the United Church of Canada, was given to students free at a certain age in Sunday School. It is cloth bound, not leather and has no special identifier on the cover. It has maps at the back, but in black and white and only three: ‘The Ancient World’ (actually the eastern Mediterranean sometime prior to the arrival of the Roman Empire in the east); ‘Palestine’, with three inset maps of Palestine at the time of the Tribes of Israel; at the time of the Kingdoms of Judah & Israel and ancient Jerusalem; thirdly, ‘The Mediterranean World in the First Century’ – listing some of the Roman provinces and showing as far west as Italy. The book is published by the American Bible Society and is less obviously directed towards historical study than the 1899 Bible.

Sunday School classes in the United Church of Canada were heavily weighted towards teaching basic Christianity utilizing the Bible, reinforced by hymns for children such as Jesus Bids Us Shine.

My memory of my elder brother (who died of cancer 16 years ago) was of a natural cynic about Christianity. He claimed to me when a teenager that he had read through the Bible and was unimpressed. When my family lived in Toronto and he was a teenager, my parents made him attend their United Church congregation there, rather than senior Sunday School. I recall one time when I attended too,  instead of going to Sunday School, he gave me lessons on how to avoid boredom. He brought along paper and a pencil and sat drawing pictures or doodling through the service. He told me I should do the same if I were ever required to undergo this experience in the future.

In later life he became an aficionado of various exotic spiritualities. After his death, when my sister and I travelled to the family home where his life ended, I found a book shelf filled with volumes on Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto and New Age material, but no Bibles. I think he was a bit ahead of his time in terms of the decline of active (or even passive) Christian belief in Canada. A harbinger, if you will.

It is interesting though, that he kept this Bible, even if not on his main bookshelf.

Insurance?

1873

This is another Harding published Bible, belonging to my father’s mother. It has some interesting aspects as compared to the first two of my trio of 19th century Bibles. Firstly, for the economic historian, the price and place of purchase are given:  $15.00 in Oswego, NY.  I found a handy inflation calculator that tells me that $15 US is in 2020 equivalent to $338.43.  This is $439.40 in Canadian dollars today, January 2, 2020. The most expensive modern Bible I could find in roughly the same size and bound in genuine calfskin leather,  retails for $119.99 US. Here are the particulars of this modern version from the publisher’s site (Thomas Nelson Bibles – a division of HarperCollins (see the 1864 Bible post):

• 9780785220718
• Release DateDec 18, 2018
• Weight 4.210
• Height 11.11 in
• Width 6.11 in
• Pages 2240
• Price $119.99  (155.79 Canadian)
• Bible Translation New King James Version
• Features Ribbon Marker, Thumb Index
• Language English

The 1873 Aseltine Bible weighs 9.4 pounds and measures 11 inches by 9 inches.

So, the 1873 Bible (purchased in 1874) is more expensive than the most expensive printed Bible today. This is one case where inflation worked in reverse.

The 1873 Bible has improved on the 1860 by the same publisher. It has ‘glossing’ (marginal notes – the kind teachers used to punish you for scribbling in the margins of books, but which has a long and honorable history). It has an extensive note index, but no colour, unlike the 1864 Collins Bible.

What interests me here more, however, is the cross border factor. The Aseltine or sometimes written Asselstine family were (and perhaps still are) a large family scattered around the Kingston, Ontario region. If you ever visit Upper Canada Village along the St. Lawrence river east of Kingston, one of the displays is the Asselstine Woolen Mill.  The link here doesn’t say where the building was moved from, but I know it was moved from Odessa, Ontario, a village just north of Kingston.

This family were of Dutch origin, living in the Hudson Valley region of New York.  The Canadian branch were Loyalists who fled to Upper Canada after the American Revolution. They set up one of their businesses in Odessa, Ontario. The purchaser of this Bible, William Henry Aseltine moved back and forth across the border. This was common in those days. Even in my day, so to speak, all you needed was a birth certificate to prove you were Canadian to cross into the U.S. Oswego NY was the closest town on the US side for Canadians in eastern Ontario.

Anti-semitism is a side note of the history shown in this Aseltine family Bible – William Henry Aseltine had a son named Charles who became a bank manager in New York City for the Chase National Bank.  Here is a bit of banking history for you. The Chase National Bank was formed in 1877 and through a number of characteristic capitalistic mergers and purchases is today JPMorgan Chase and Company, but operates publicly as the Chase Bank. Why did I zip off in this direction?  Well!  When my ancestor Charles Asselstine began to climb the corporate ladder in NYC, he was told his name sounded too Jewish. So, he changed the family name to Aseltine from Asselstine. Further research by me a few years back revealed that in the 16th century, the Asselstines in the Netherlands were in fact Jewish and converted to Reformed Christianity and later moved to the Dutch New Amsterdam colony. The Brits took New Amsterdam from the Dutch and renamed the colony New York.  This unearthed bit of family history made real the dry facts of what I label in my courses ‘the other’ and its very real consequences for real people.

What else can I draw out of this material object for the understanding of religion and life in the 19th century?  The Bible is leather bound and has a metal clasp to hold it closed. It is published and printed in Philadelphia. A middle class man (and what is interesting here is that the book was purchased by a man, not a woman) thought it important enough to spend a large amount of money on it.

Inside on the ‘Marriages’ page between the Old and New Testaments, William Henry takes the first entries and reveals another fact of 19th century life. He was married twice. Today that would normally mean a divorce and remarriage. But in the 19th century, that meant a first wife who died as the result of child birth. The Charles who changed his name was my grandmother’s half brother from the first marriage. Men had to be married for a number of reasons in the 19th century, as did women for other reasons. Modern understandings of marriage and family see the traditional role of women as one of oppression, but in an era where family was central and science and technology weak,  a wife was a necessity to run all the many tasks of a household allowing the husband to concentrate on work. A husband was necessary as pregnancy made work difficult if not impossible.   Why did men work outside the household and women in? There is a whole literature on this, but here is the condensed version:  work mostly meant physical labour for most people and men biologically have greater muscle mass and aggression, and to repeat the evidence from this Bible, women often died in child birth. This set a gender role for men and women whether they worked at labour or in offices. These roles had an economic basis therefore, that was reinforced by religion.

The feminist movement did not change this in any real sense until the invention of the birth control pill in the 1960s. It is no accident that Christian churches began to accommodate divorce, as did the law, also in the 1960s. The earlier beginnings of home technology – vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and the slow decline of death caused by child birth due to the growth of medical science preceded the ‘pill’, but women gaining control over reproduction was the essential agent of social change. The existence of the centre pages with places for family milestones (marriages, births, deaths) indicates the also central role of religion in family life.  I could not find any reference to these pages being included in modern ‘family’ Bibles. I’m not immediately sure what to make of this lack.

It is on the basis of material evidence combined with documentary evidence that we can, as R.G. Collingwood noted, rethink the thoughts of the past and in this case begin to understand the integration of religion and society.

1864

This Bible has its covers – detached but still in existence. The interior of the front matter gives a date of 1864, but for some reason, the title page for the New Testament says 1865. I wanted to put the cover front and centre to give an idea of the intricacy and heft of book covers for family Bibles in the mid 19th century. I have added other images: the title page showing this, the Bates family Bible, was published and printed in Glasgow Scotland. An interior note says the company had permission from the Crown to produce 3,000 copies of this edition. William Collins & Co. is an interesting example of publishing. The firm began as a publisher of Bibles and religious books in 1819, indicating that this was a profitable niche. A hundred years later it began to publish fiction, murder mysteries in particular. Now it is part of the conglomerate HarperCollins as publishing companies attempt to deal with the rise of eBooks and the online world in general by uniting into larger firms.

It is indeed, deluxe. Not only does it have the usual black & white artwork illustrating scenes from the Bible, this edition contains coloured maps and has, running in a column down the centre of each page, explanatory notes and references to the text on either side.

Family Bibles were not some dusty book on a shelf sitting ignored, but were used for study by the family. In the 1860 post I focussed on the integration of religion with business. Here you see the integration of faith with daily, family life.  The entries in the same handwriting and pen were probably done in the 1880s by my grandmother’s mother (a Wright from the 1860 Wright family Bible). I don’t mean to get into genealogy here, but am thinking through the time period that family Bibles were used, at least in my mother’s family. The last entries in this Bates family Bible were made by my mother between the 1940s and the early 1970s. This is important also to note something useful to the historian:  handwriting. Handwriting (now called cursive for some cursed reason) is highly individualistic. Thus you can get a sense of who wrote what, when. An historian will not necessarily or even usually know the individual doing the writing (I recognize my mother’s handwriting as she used to send me letters), but can discern different personal styles and assign rough dates to them. Future historians who are taught only printing and not handwriting will have to take special classes in reading handwriting in the future or lose a large swathe of historical information.

1860

The first thing I did when looking at this page was do a quick google search of William W. Harding. I found that he was the publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper from 1859 to 1889.  The paper was founded in 1829 and purchased soon after by Harding’s father Jasper. It was then called the Pennsylvania Inquirer. Like a good capitalist, Jasper expanded the business by purchasing newspapers in the region – all printed on flat-bed presses, the direct descendant of Gutenberg’s press. His son William White Harding took over in 1859 and changed the name to the Philadelphia Inquirer and upgraded the press to a Bullock steam press. This was a rotating press developed by William Bullock, also of Philadelphia. The rotating press allowed continuous printing onto rolls of paper. This type of printing press was invented in 1814 by a German living in England and was taken up by the Times of London which ensured its adoption widely. The steam driven rotating press was developed in the U.S. in 1843. Bullock further improved the technology in such a way that allowed printing on both sides of the paper at the same time and also automatically folded and cut it into sheets.  Thus the wonder of capitalism and technology so opposed by the Left today.  When the Times changed over, their printers threatened violence, but the company promised them other jobs, ending the threat. Thus the wonder of organized Labour softening capitalism and technology. The Bullock press could print 12,000 sheets an hour and with later improvements that increased to 30,000 sheets. Today newspapers are shedding their printing operations to go online, or consolidating them into central locations for a number of publications owned by large corporations. Of course, this is what the Hardings did in the 19th century too. The difference is that the employees losing their jobs are not being moved elsewhere in their respective  companies. A change in how information is disseminated is underway and has been underway for a number of years now. But, in the 19th century, printing presses were the technology of the day and still had a century and more to dominate how information was spread.

The Bible above is dated to 1860, the second year that William W. Harding ran the company. I wonder were Bibles a money maker? Business men were Christians then and combined their Christianity with their business world. I saw this while working on my PhD dissertation and while writing entries for a local historical project, The Dictionary of Hamilton Biography. Business men (and they were all men) belonged to several clubs, including their church. Working class men might or might not belong to one of the early union organizations such as the Knights of Labour, but did have their own churches as well. English-speaking Canada and most of the Anglosphere was dominated by Protestant Christianity, for which the Bible was central. Political speeches, newspaper articles and reports, novels, poetry, were all peppered with Biblical references that were commonly understood. All of this, of course, began to fall apart in the 1960s, but that is a subject for the last two entries of this series of blog posts. In 1860, the Bible was the book both in terms of religion and in terms of cultural  norms. If a person had read no other book, that person had read at least parts of the Bible and understood Biblical references.

This volume lacks a cover or back, but still has the spine holding it all together, which brings to mind the old metaphor about needing a backbone to withstand the vicissitudes of life. Harding was a good example of what used to be called ‘Yankee ingenuity’, combined with family inheritance.  He changed the name of his inherited newspaper to the Philadelphia Inquirer, perhaps a reflection of the growth of urbanism and its concomitant pride in one’s city. He updated the technology at the same time and began to print Bibles in 1860. He sold the business in 1889 just prior to his death, but the new owners continued in the same vein.

This particular copy belonged to my maternal grandmother’s mother. My maternal grandmother had the maiden name Bates and her mother’s maiden name was Wright. Thus, this is the Wright family Bible. In the section dividing the Old and New Testaments of these very large, family Bibles, there are pages  for writing in marriages, births and deaths. Family and Christianity were in the same fashion as business and Christianity, an integral whole. These Bibles usually included plates of  images of Biblical scenes – I wonder if research has been done on the artists who drew the pictures?  I would guess a book could be written about these large Bibles. These books must have had pride of place in a house as they are large – the three copies I have are roughly 11 x 9 inches and about 3 – 4 inches thick – let me translate that to metric:  28 cm x 23 cm and 10 cm thick. They have heavy bound covers and spines and often a metal clasp to hold the book shut. This 1860 copy is missing both the front and back covers, but still has the heavy back attached. They are sewn, not glued as well. They scream permanence and solidity.

Our civilization’s artifacts say much in a language that few speak today in a conscious fashion, saying different things at different points in history. 1860 was a time where solidity, permanence, and confidence nestled within technological change, or rather technological change did not challenge faith. Technological change served the Biblical foundation.  Bibles were designed to last and to represent the foundation of social relations – reminding all of the teachings about building on a rock, not shifting sand.  If you click on this link, you will see I used the King James translation as would be proper for 1860.

This was a society linked corporately by an inchoate and at the same time, learned knowledge of the Bible in its King James version in the English-speaking world. This Bible represents a world now lost where faith was integrated into all aspects of life, whether you actually believed the doctrines or not. There were Catholics who shared in this but who were on the outside to a degree, though the translation used in 1860, the Douay/Rheims had much the same form of English. This was a Protestant world where Catholics were on the outside, and non-Christians barely acknowledged, though in the 19th century the only non-Christians the majority had any awareness of were Jews.

Bibles as artifacts represented a world where language, architecture, education, science, technology, social relations, entertainment aspired to a formality (not always achieved – there is a good literature on drinking culture in this period) as an ideal. A sense of permanence permeated life, which I suppose made the frantic and seemingly sudden changes of the second haf of the 20th century all the more startling when they came.

Poetry in different styles

I am actually reading this book online – it is on my iPhone, purchased from Apple Books. But I also purchased the print version, published by Leonard Cohen’s long time publisher McClelland & Stewart, now alas a minor imprint of PenguinRandomHouse, one of the big 5 English language publishing behemoths.

Mostly I now read on my phone as I cannot afford printed books both in terms of cost and in terms of space. My home office and a small former bedroom are stuffed with books. Some are neatly arrayed on shelves, others in crazy, teetering stacks. One year I decided to set aside 12 books which I would read over the ensuing 12 months. At the end of that year, I had read 4 and purchased another 12. So much for that.

I am a poet. I began as such in my teen years, inspired by a sudden urge to buy two poetry books. Well, the urge did not come from nowhere. In Latin class, I became enriched by the poetry of Catullus. I went to the school library on my spare period and found there an unexpurgated copy of Catullus. While the ‘stupids’ of the school made mocking noises at me in their enforced library periods, I was reading scatological and sexually explict poetry from this collection. This spurred me on to go into downtown Windsor, Ontario to an edgy chain bookshop called Classic books. Edgy because of its window displays. At this visit they had a toilet in the window with a stuffed dummy dangling head down with head in toilet. It was that kind of bookstore. There I bought Margaret Atwood’s The Animals in That Country and Leonard Cohen’s Selected  Poems 1956-1968. I did not like Margaret Atwood’s poetry at all, though later I came to appreciate her prose. Ah, but Leonard!  His poetry inspired me to a splurge of poetry writing and one absurdist play.

This all fell into abeyance as life hit me in the face. I had many years then of fathering, husbanding, working at jobs unsuitable, grad studenting, professing (part time). Ten years ago I began writing poetry again. Ten years later I have hundreds, or perhaps thousands of poems scattered around my hard drive, iCloud, a few publications online, and on memory sticks. Your fault Mr. Leonard Cohen!  Your fault!

What’s in a Cover?

This is an old textbook of mine. I took a course in the History of Russia back in the early 1980s. I don’t recall the exact year, but do remember it was a Summer night course at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario: two 3 hours classes a week for 12 weeks. Back then I was completing my undergraduate degree in History as an interest and a hobby. I would scan the offerings and register in History courses that caught my eye. Eventually I earned my degree and beyond the eventual I earned a PhD in History, but that is another story.

This cover brought to mind a number of impressions and memories and ideas, some related, some not. Firstly, the course itself. It was taught by a young PhD from Rochester, NY (my mother’s home town). He had just come from teaching a similar course at one of the Toronto universities over a September to April term. When he finished our class in Hamilton, Ontario in late August, he marked the final exams quickly as he had to be in Calgary within a few days to teach the same again there. This was the life of the academic who had not won the lottery of a full-time, tenured teaching position, or a position in government. Back then, experts on Russia were in demand as the Cold War was still freezing and threatening to thaw into a hot war. No one then predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Empire.  I wondered at the time and even today, where he got the financing to drive across a foreign country (and probably  the U.S. too) from job to job and new apartment to new apartment. He was an effective teacher with more than a touch of irony about his subject, no doubt gained from the irony of his own employment situation.

This book was not the main text, by the way. That was Nicholas Riasnovsky’s A History of Russia (3rd edition) – one of the few hard cover texts I managed to buy in my undergraduate or graduate experience. But then I was working as a Payroll Clerk at Westinghouse Canada and chose to spend my pin money this way rather than on other hobbies.

The cover here told me other things too. For example, look at the price:  $6.50.  Well that was not the price in Canada. I peeled back the round sticker that says Clarke Irwin (the Canadian publisher; Dutton was the American publisher) and underneath was the Canadian price, $7.75. I googled the book to see if it were still in print. It is, but now under the umbrella of the largest publishing conglomerate in the world: Penguin Random House for $22.00. The Canadian price now from Indigo:  $21.99. More curious still, Penguin Random House has categorized it under its Fairly Tale slot!  I am still chuckling over that. The author Serge Zenkovsky, who died in 1990, must be laughing somewhere. O tempus, O mores  (I will leave any readers of this blog-to-book to google this). The E.P. Dutton Company, founded in the mid 19th century ended its independence in 1975. After a journey through several ownerships , this company was acquired by Penguin, which in 2015 merged with Random House. This book cover is also therefore a tale of the end of mid-sized and even some large publishing companies to the point that the English language market is now controlled by only five, called the Big Five.  Here is a chart (too large to copy here):

http://almossawi.com/big-five-publishers/

The imprint on PenguinRandomHouse’s  (the company actually does elide the words) page credits a company called Plume as the publisher now – you can find that company part way down the list in the image linked above.  Virtually all of these were independent publishing companies at one time, many within my own lifetime.

Clarke Irwin was a publishing company founded in Toronto in 1930 which ceased to exist in 2002 when it was purchased by a Scottish pubishing company, Thomas Nelson. That company is now part of another of the Big 5, Harper Collins (itself owned by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp). Complexity upon complexity. Clarke Irwin published many of the main textbooks used in Canadian schools as well as the work of authors such as Robertson Davies and Emily Carr. Actually the end date of 2002 is misleading. The company lost its hold on Canadian text book publishing in the 1970s and was bankrupt by 1981. It went through several owners after that until being purchased by Nelson in 2002, at which point its imprint was discarded. I used this book, as I said, at McMaster. And that is where the archives of Clarke Irwin are treasured.

This History book (or fairly tale if you accept PenguinRandomHouse’s categorization) displays on its cover another history, that of publishing in the English-speaking (and reading) world.