CAMBRIDGE KING JAMES BIBLE, 1765, BEAUTIFULLY BOUND

(BIBLE). The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments. Cambridge: Printed by Joseph Bentham and sold by John Beecroft, John Rivington, James Waugh, et al., 1765. 12mo, contemporary full blue-green morocco gilt with red and green morocco onlays, raised bands, elaborately gilt-decorated spine, red morocco spine label, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. $5500.

1765 "Standard Edition" of the King James Bible, distinctively bound in contemporary onlaid and elaborately gilt-tooled morocco, with intriguing provenance detailed in six manuscript pages of family history.

The King James Bible, first published in 1611, is described as "the only literary masterpiece ever to be produced by a committee and was the work of nearly fifty translators… [who] lived at a period when the genius of the language was in full flower… [Macaulay praised it as] "a book, which if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power" (PMM 114). In 1762, Bentham printed what became the standard edition of that magisterial translation: "In this Bible a serious attempt was made [by S.F. Parris] to correct the text of King James' version by amending the spelling and punctuation, unifying and extending the use of italics, and removing printers' errors" (Darlow & Moule 854). This 1765 twelvemo Bentham printing preserves the Parris text as it stood before Blayney's revisions in 1769. Without Apocrypha; with a separate title page for the New Testament. Darlow & Moule 867. ESTC N473261. Herbert 1164. Preliminary and final leaves used as family record for the Craggs family of Leighton Buzzard (some family members described as coming from Jamaica) and subsequent owners in the Gosden and Gilbert families; the earliest birth noted with the date 1770 and the latest 1845.

Binding with very slight rubbing and small areas of unobtrusive restoration. A strikingly handsome Bible.