The Royal Printer’s Tale, 1577 to 1611

The final chapter traces the Elizabethan bibles’ subsequent printing history, when, the story goes, the Geneva and Tomson, their Calvinist marginalia treasured by a people hungry for God’s word, started dramatically outselling the Bishops’. The story, however, misconstrues the statistics: first, by assuming that later editions of a bible will resemble the initial one; and second, by failing to realize that after 1559 all bibles (unless imported) came from the press of a single printer—the printer who owned the bible patent. In 1578, the patent was purchased by Christopher Barker, client of those urging Genevan-style reforms. Over the next five years Barker seems to have enlisted his press in the service of this project. In 1583, however, a new archbishop having entered the picture, the Geneva and Tomson shed their militantly Calvinist prefaces, and the Bishops’ came back in print, albeit only the massive folio and stripped of its distinctive paratexts. The Geneva quartos outsold their Bishops’ counterpart because the latter was not for sale. But Barker’s Geneva quartos differ considerably from earlier Genevas, the banished Calvinist preface having been replaced with a flock of mere Christian paratexts. The increasingly popular small-format editions have no notes; between 1583 and 1611 nearly half the Genevas and three-quarters of the Tomsons provide just the translation. These are not Calvinist bibles but forerunners of the King James, their popularity indicative of a broadly based preference for bibles that did not encase the text in confessionalized orthodoxies but did fit comfortably in one’s pocket.