Smithsonian.com lists the top 10 books lost to time.
posted by reenum on Sep 27, 2011 - 67 comments

"It is absurd to talk about a Judeo-Christian tradition".
I had been born in the United States but didn't know any English because none was spoken at home or in the streets. We were a solid enclave of some 600,000 Eastern European, Yiddish-speaking Jews. But I still remember one day that a missionary came to the door with what I still have my copy of: a Yiddish translation of the New Testament. There's a kind of grim joke in that, isn't there? In the mere existence of it.
Harold Bloom on religion in America, God smoking a cigar, and who really is the King of the Jews.
posted by matteo on Dec 4, 2005 - 72 comments

The Man Who Unwrote the Bible. In the mid-1720s, Alexander Cruden took on a self-imposed task of Herculean proportions: he decided to compile the most thorough concordance of the King James Version of the Bible (777,746 words). The first edition of Cruden's Concordance was published in 1737. Every similar undertaking before or since has been the work of a vast team of people. Cruden worked alone in his lodgings, writing the whole thing out by hand. Cruden's day job was as a "Corrector of the Press" (proofreader). He would give hawk-eyed attention to prose all day long. Then he would come home at night to read the Bible—stopping at every single word to secure the right sheet from the tens of thousands of pieces of paper all around him and to record accurately the reference in its appropriate place. He had no patron, no publisher, no financial backers: his only commission was a divine one.
Cruden's Concordance has never been out of print. A new book tells the tale of Alexander the Corrector's bizarre, sad life (scroll down to about half page).
posted by matteo on Apr 3, 2005 - 10 comments

The Gutenberg Bible : the first book printed with movable type, is the one of the greatest treasures in the University of Texas's Ransom Center's collections. It was printed at Johann Gutenberg's shop in Mainz, Germany and completed in 1454 or 1455. The Center's Bible was acquired in 1978 and is one of only five complete examples in the United States. All 1,282 pages now available for viewing on the Ransom Center's Web site. Also check out the anatomy of a page.
posted by ColdChef on Jul 23, 2003 - 16 comments

Apparently exposure to violence in media caused the Columbine massacre. There's a best-selling book, readily available in nearly every book store in the US, which includes descriptions of genocide, wars, deliberately-caused plagues, mass killing of children, cities being put to the sword, and which portrays those responsible for these crimes as heroes! Clearly it establishes a culture of violence and should be suppressed. The success of this book (the best selling book of all time, which is regularly given to children!) makes clear that the publishing "industry will not effectively regulate itself, and that court intervention is necessary to keep violent [books] out of the hands of minors."

No question about it: there should be a class action suit against all publishers of the Bible.
posted by Steven Den Beste on Apr 22, 2001 - 49 comments