Yes, I'm afraid it's another Bible post. What can I say, it's Lent. I found this interesting article via Book Patrol about the business of publishing Bibles. Here's an excerpt:
The familiar observation that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time obscures a more startling fact: the Bible is the best-selling book of the year, every year. Calculating how many Bibles are sold in the United States is a virtually impossible task, but a conservative estimate is that in 2005 Americans purchased some twenty-five million Bibles—twice as many as the most recent Harry Potter book. The amount spent annually on Bibles has been put at more than half a billion dollars.
In some ways, this should not be surprising. According to the Barna Group, an evangelical polling firm, forty-seven per cent of Americans read the Bible every week. But other research has found that ninety-one per cent of American households own at least one Bible—the average household owns four—which means that Bible publishers manage to sell twenty-five million copies a year of a book that almost everybody already has.
—Daniel Radosh, The Good Book Business [The New Yorker]
Someone should tell James Cameron that he might make more money going the Mel Gibson route! But I digress...
I've certainly been a good Bible customer, with six NRSVs (the seventh is on the way), a complete parallel Bible (four translations), an NRSV parallel Gospels, and a bilingual (Spanish-English) NIV, not to mention two concordances and a whopping big commentary. This is really backwards to how things used to be in monasteries in the middle ages. According to The Book, commentaries by "Church Fathers" such as Jerome and Augustine far outnumbered Bibles in old monastic libraries. Monks and nuns heard readings from Scripture several times a day in chapel and during meals, but it was the commentaries that they studied in detail. Over time the two texts came together in what are called glossed Bibles (see below), with excerpts from the great commentaries written on the same page with the biblical text. This tradition continues today with annotated ("study") Bibles, except that now the comments are written by scholars drawing on two thousand years of thought and research. It's a wonder that a book so old can keep getting better and better.
