Bay Psalm Book
The Bay Psalm Book , originally called The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Meter , was the first book to be printed in the English colonies on American soil. It is a new translation of the Psalter that appeared in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1640 .
The Puritan settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had brought some psalteries from Europe to New England, but their spiritual leaders were apparently not convinced of their sincerity, so they commissioned a new translation, taking into account the Hebrew original, by a council of "Thirty learned and pious pastors" was carried out. A printing press was specially imported from England for printing - the first in North America. The authorship of the foreword is still disputed today; many researchers attribute it to Richard Mather , others to John Cotton .
In the third edition of 1651 some bumps were smoothed, and this new version was in New England until the 18th century as The New England Psalm Book in use, then it was by the metric and poetic unequally more elegant version of the King James Version replaced . It also saw some editions in England and Scotland. The ninth American edition of 1698 was the first to be printed with sheet music .
Eleven copies of the first edition have survived to this day, one of which is kept in the Library of Congress . On November 26, 2013, one was auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York and it came from the holdings of Boston’s Old South Church . David Rubenstein bought it for $ 14.165 million . This makes the Bay Psalm Book the most expensive printed book ever to be auctioned.
literature
- Eames Wilberforce (Ed.): The Bay Psalm Book: Being a Facsimile Reprint of the First Edition, Printed by Stephen Daye at Cambridge, in New England in 1640 . Dodd, Mead & Co., New York 1903. (Facsimile of the first edition from 1640)
- Hugh Amory, "Gods Altar Needs Not Our Pollishings": Revisiting the Bay Psalm Book. In: Printing History 12, 1990. pp. 2-14.
- Willis Barnstone: Misalliance of Theory and Practice or Parable of the Bay Psalm Book. In: Translation Review 32-33, 1990. pp. 22-26.
- JH Dorenkamp: The Bay Psalm Book and the Ainsworth Psalter. In: Early American Literature 7, 1972. pp. 3-16.
- Zoltán Haraszti: The Enigma of the Bay Psalm Book . University of Chicago Press, 1956.
- Irving Lowens: The Bay Psalm Book in Seventeenth-Century New England. In: Journal of the American Musicological Society 8, 1955. pp. 22-29.
- Amy Morris: The Art of Purifying: The Bay Psalm Book and Colonial Puritanism. In: Early American Literature 42: 1, 2007. pp. 107-130.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ James Barron: Book Published in 1640 Sets a Record at Auction . In: The New York Times (online edition), November 26, 2013.
- ↑ Thousands of misprints and thick ink stains in FAZ from November 29, 2013, page 35.