The Form of the (Good) Book

The message to Augustine was to "take and read," so he opened the Scriptures and believed. He found what was important, the life-giving words, inside. So what are we to make of a blog whose focus on the Bible is all exterior. On the surface. On appearances. Is it superficial? Shallow? Or on the contrary, it is about time? I'll let you be the judge.

Here at the Master's Artist, we're a passionate bunch, and one love we have in common is the love of books. I was smitten at an early age, and not by exotic leather-bound treasures. My father kept a dried up cache of Dale Carnegie paperbacks in an old gym bag -- really, 'kept' them is an overstatement; I think he'd forgotten them there. As a boy, I discovered them and grew fascinated. Books held so much secret knowledge -- how to win friends, how to influence people -- and they were themselves so fascinating in form. I could spend hours at the library just looking at them. Once an older cousin in college took me to the university library and let me check out books. I was in heaven. I kept a stock of them at home, whatever people happened to discard, and I wasn't too choosy about topics. Any book would do.

I never lost that interest in the form of books, but in time I came to recognize the difference between well-made volumes and trash. Not that all books should last forever, or that cheap ones don't serve a purpose, but sometimes the disparity between the quality of a book's content and its cover is a bit of an outrage. The more important the book, the more wrong such incongruity feels.

When it comes to Bible publishing, there is much to love, and much to lament. They don't make them like they used to. The leather feels like cardboard, the paper is gray with bleed-through text, and the bindings are glued for expediency, not sewn to last. It makes sense that, to provide options at every price bracket, some editions would be like this -- but I worry that it has become the standard. And when I worry about something, I write.

And thus the Bible Design & Binding Blog was born.

Above: Don't try this at home! I call it "Bible yoga." The sign of a supple binding.

Here, the subject is not the content of the Bible, but its form. I write about quality binding and innovative design, reviewing editions from a variety of publishers. Believe it or not, there are a lot of people interested in this topic. No, that's an understatement. Obsessed is the word. And as a result, my little blog has gotten a lot of attention. It's no longer about me and my opinions. A community has formed.

In the beginning, there were just a couple of essays posted on my main site, jmarkbertrand.com. I'd written about the shortcomings of modern Bible publishing, what to look for in a good edition, and how to have a copy bound in, say, bonded leather re-bound in supple goatskin. Of all the content on my site, these pages generated the most traffic -- and the most e-mail. I received messages on a daily basis from people who'd stumbled onto my site and found their own suspicions confirmed. Without realizing it, by writing about my own concerns, I'd touched a collective nerve.

To be honest, I found the attention mysterious and a little frustrating. I felt the way a one-hit wonder might while trying to promote a new album. As I busily attempted to promote my own writing, what people really wanted to chat with me about was their Bibles. But I couldn't sustain those feelings for long, because I wanted to talk about them, too.

Of course, it's not enough to talk -- there must be photographs. One of the odd disconnects of modern Bible publishing is that they don't market the product so much as the box it comes in. If you wanted to make a once-in-a-lifetime Bible purchase, a beautiful calfskin edition on good paper that you can pass down to your kids, the odds are you won't find it stocked at the local Christian bookstore. And if you shop online, the photos tend to feature the colorful boxes, or give you a nice two-dimensional, low contrast, shot of a cover (i.e., a black rectangle). So it's hard to know what you're getting until it's too late. So I took out my camera and started photographing nice editions, trying to find ways to express visually how they feel in the hand.

Above: The focus isn't entirely Old School. Technology creeps in, as with this iPhone displaying the text of Exodus 14.

We all have milestones, ways of measuring whether what we're doing is really a success. For me, it came when I opened up the mail one day and found the latest Cambridge University Press catalogue. On page 11, which is devoted to the wide margin edition of the New American Standard Bible, there was a large quote from one of my reviews, with my name underneath. I'd known it was coming, but seeing the words in print sent a chill up the proverbial spine.

So what have I learned from all this? It's simple. When you write about your passions, as obscure and specialized as they seem, you may find an audience of people who share that perspective -- or are captivated enough to learn more. Sometimes an author builds a platform, but sometimes he stumbles onto a stage already there, a packed theater that no one has yet thought to perform for. The success of the Bible Design & Binding Blog is the latter scenario. The more it grows, the more surprised I am.

That's why I decided to share it with you today. I figured my friends at the Master's Artist might wonder what I've been up to, and might share my interest in the details of Bible manufacture. We are people of the book, after all. I invite you to visit sometime and check it out. What I've shown you here is just the tip of the iceberg. A fascinating world of minutiae awaits...

-- JMB

J. Mark Bertrand is the author of Rethinking Worldview: Learning to Think, Live, and Speak in This World (Crossway, 2007). He blogs at his own site jmarkbertrand.com, The Rethinking Worldview Blog, and The Bible Design and Binding Blog. You can also catch him at his new blog about the literary life -- Write About Now.

Comments

[Madison Richards]

Gotta give you a shout out for the iPhone pic... Love, love, love my iPhone!!

Cool new blog too. I agree that writing to your passions needs to come first. It's one of those inevitable rules of the Kingdom (at least, the kingdom called Hollywood):

"If you build it, they will come!"

Madison

[Michelle Van Loon]

It may be minutiae in the universe of websites, but for the people who are passionate about the subject, it becomes the main course. At the bookstore where I work part-time, Bible binding and packaging is a HUGE topic for many of our customers.

Kind of a "field of dreams" thing - if you bind it, and blog about it, they will come.

Then, Cambridge University Press will quote you - and on that page with the uber-nice NASB with the goatskin binding.

[Angie Poole]

When I first saw your Bible Binding Blog, I figured you needed a hobby, except you had that whole "everything red" passion, the shaving thing, and you wrote--all while holding down a teaching position. So I figured you had weird--ahem--eccentric hobbies.

Guess the joke is on me!

Congrats on the review in the catalogue. That's just too cool.

[Dee Stewart]

ain't it the truth! stumbling upon a platform love it. Love the blog, saw your name in my catalogue and screamed I kinda know that guy!!!