The Best-Selling Book of All Time
by Bob Brooke

With estimated total sales of over 5 billion copies, the Christian Bible is the best-selling publication of all time. Old Bibles occasionally show up at antique shows and church festivals. Most are large Victorian pictorial family ones with a variety of features in addition to the traditional religious verse. Besides the Old and New Testaments, many include a Concordance, Aprocypha, and Psalms, and lots and lots of beautiful illustrations.

With Bibles, condition is all important. Large family Bibles from the 19th century, particularly study Bibles with illustrations, maps, and commentary are very popular with collectors. But what do old Bibles include? Surely, the Old and New Testaments, but there’s often much more. Bibles published for various Christian religions may include different features, such as a Bible Dictionary, a History of the Religious Dominations of the World, and detailed studies of the events and persons in the Bible’s text. Then there’s the endless variety of translations. For most Bible collectors, figuring out how to narrow the scope of their collection can be a challenge.

The Bible is an anthology of instructions, stories, poetry, and prophecies. Different religious communities compiled the religious texts into several official collections or canons. The earliest contained the first five books of the Bible, called the Torah, meaning “Teaching” in Hebrew, and the Pentateuch, meaning “five books” in Greek. The second-oldest part was the Nevi'im, a collection of narrative histories and prophecies. The third collection, the Ketuvim, contained psalms, proverbs, and narrative histories.

The term Bible came from the Greek word meaning “books” originally referred to the Hebrew Bible which corresponds to the Christian Old Testament. The Christian Bible, on the other hand, also contains the New Testament.

Today’s Bible is a collection of books. The oldest ones began as stories and songs transmitted by word-of-mouth from generation to generation, long before the birth of Jesus. Many people, mostly unknown, of different cultures and languages wrote and compiled the Bible. The living conditions of the writers—political, cultural, economic, and ecological—varied enormously.

Biblical texts reflect a nomadic existence. It contains texts from people with an established monarchy and Temple cult, texts from exiles, texts born out of fierce oppression by foreign rulers, courtly texts, texts from wandering charismatic preachers, texts from those who gave themselves the airs of sophisticated Hellenistic writers.

The gospels, which were stories about the life and teachings of Jesus, along with the Paul’s epistles, and other texts, quickly coalesced into the New Testament. The oldest parts of the Bible may be as early as 1200 BCE, while the New Testament had mostly formed by the 4th century CE.

The first codex form of the Hebrew Bible, the forerunner of the modern book, was produced in the 7th century. Popularized by early Christians, it was made by folding a single sheet of papyrus in half, forming "pages". Assembling multiples of these folded pages together created a "book" that was more easily accessible and more portable than scrolls. The first complete printed press version of the Hebrew Bible was produced in 1488.

The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work. Most early Christian copyists weren’t trained scribes. They produced many copies of the gospels and Paul's letters soon after the originals appeared.

Early Christians transported Pauls’ letters around the Roman Empire, translating them into Old Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, and Latin, and other languages. Historians believe he died before 68 CE during Nero's reign.

The King James version of the Bible, revised many times over the centuries, is probably the most famous one in the English language. But prior to its printing, at least 239 editions of the English Bible were already in print. Since 1611, the number of English versions has exploded.

Gustave Doré was one of the most acclaimed and popular illustrators of the 19th century, and his illustrated Bible is a landmark in the field. He made more than 200 engravings, illustrating the events of the Bible with great detail. The first edition appeared in France in 1866, but publishers like George Jones reprinted his work throughout the following decades.

The elaborateness of the binding doesn’t affect a Bible’s price. A Bible’s value depends mostly on the completeness, condition, content, and size of its pages, not on the age of the piece of leather that it happens to be bound in at the time. Many collectors prefer a new leather binding, to one that’s worn and less attractive. They’re more interested in the quality of the pages of text.

Ninety percent of all Bibles are standard "Quarto" size printings, measuring about 7 to 10 inches wide by 9 to 12 inches tall by 3 to 4 inches thick. Larger pulpit "Folio" size printings are ten times as rare, therefore more expensive.

Old Bibles are always hardbound. Most have full leather covers and spine while some have leather spines and corners but fabric centers on the front and back covers.

Armored or ornamented bindings with metalwork at the corners and center and clasps and latches that hold the book shut also adorn some of these Bibles. Most old family Bibles also have raised bands on their spine known as a “hubbed” spine.

Bible makers used two decorative techniques—blind stamping, in which an impression was stamped into the leather, resulting in a design in which where gold had been applied into the groove of the stamping, such as the words "Holy Bible," which might have been stamped in gold onto the spine.

Older Bibles often include a “concordance,” also referred to as “The Table of Names and Table of Things.” This is essentially an alphabetical index to the scripture which helps readers locate a passage based on what words appear in that passage.

Some older Bibles offer a 36-page illustrated "Family Tree of Man" which traces every generation of the first 4,000 years of mankind, from Adam and Eve through Noah through David to Joseph, Mary, and Christ.

Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible is probably the most valuable printed book, with single leaves selling for $60,000 and up. Bibles are the most common book in the world, especially in the English language.

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