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Bibliophily might be thought to be its own kind of religion, though that veers toward blasphemy. Rather, religion runs through the history of book like a spine, or better still, like a network of arteries. It is no accident that the first major European printed book is Gutenberg’s ca. 1455 42-line Bible (from Greek τὰ βιβλία, tà biblía, little pieces of papyrus (βίβλος, biblos), i.e., books (subdivisions of a larger work)). A botanical book doesn’t become a flower, but a religious book becomes sacred; that merits some thought about how essential religion is to books, and books, in turn, are to religion.

Easter is tomorrow, Passover was last week, Ramadan ended about three weeks ago; Spring has been thoroughly colonized by religion, whereas Autumn and even Winter maintain some of their pagan festal flavor. “People of the Book” is a term used by Muslims to refer to Christians and Jews (inter alios) who are united with them in regarding the Old Testament as emanating from (the same) god. Thus we’ll begin with a new arrival on our shelves: the first Qur’an published in America.

Whereas the first American Bible (Eliot’s “Indian Bible” of 1661–1663, translated into Natick (an Algonquian language)) sells for as much as $275,000 (we offer a single leaf, set into a publication of 1929, for considerably less), the first American Qur’an — the 1806 Koran commonly called the Alcoran of Mahomet — commands a far lower price. That in itself could be the subject of a disquisition, but I shall leave it as a mere observation. Ours passed through the hands of several early American women; John Adams’s is now kept in the Boston Public Library.

Keeping for a moment with the American theme (see one of my favorite Arader catalogues, The Holy Experiment, for a full account of our Germantown imprints), let’s turn to Tobias Eric Biörck’s 1731 graduate disputation: De plantatione ecclesiæ svecanæ In America.

The title translates to “On the plantation of the Swedish Church in America” which is as fitting a descriptor as I’ve seen of the way religion is spread: not as a virus (per Richard Dawkins) but as flowers; not all seeds blossom, but certain soils and seasons favor germination. Biörck was born in America, the son of a Swedish (Evangelical Lutheran) missionary to Delaware Bay, and his account of the first Swedes in America is accompanied by a particularly charming engraved map of Maryland, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Quite on the other end of things is the (utterly timely, you must agree) 1727 Office de la Semaine Sainte, the liturgy for Holy Week, which culminates in Easter.

 

The fanfare binding bears at its center the arms of Cardinal de Fleury, Bishop of Fréjus and chief (i.e., Prime) minister to Louis XV 1726–1743. Produced specifically for the royal household (la maison du roy), this new edition will perhaps have been a gift from the king to Cardinal de Fleury, underscoring the essential role of religious books in the economy of esteem in the ancien régime.

Spring is regarded fairly uniformly as a season of (re)birth, but Good Friday nevertheless marked the death of Jesus. For many, religion blossoms in the dark soil of the cemetery, a reminder that we are not the first to know loss or to mourn. Here, then, are three funereal publications in decreasing splendor:

Henri IV was the first Bourbon king of France, and promulgated the Edict of Nantes, a sacred legal text of religious tolerance that earned him the moniker “Good King Henry.” As king of Navarre and husband of Marie de’ Medici, his death echoed loudly in Europe; Cosimo II de’ Medici threw him a glittering funeral — offering no help to his widow, known by French aristocrats as “the fat banker” — at San Lorenzo in Florence (the late king was absent).

The Esequie d’Arrigo Quarto cristianissimo re di Francia (Funeral of Henri IV, most Christian king of France) describes that spectacle and engraves a series of paintings commissioned by Cosimo to illustrate Henri’s life. Our example was bound for Carlos III of Spain (great-great-great-grandson of both Henri and Cosimo) with his gilt armorial supralibros surrounded by painted ermine mantling.

Another Medici, Margherita (1612–1679) — who married Odoardo Farnese to become Duchess of Parma, joining two of Italy’s great houses — was given a series of radiant funerals. The Tributo d’ossequio funebre describes the funeral in Bologna (whose Jesuit college was supported by Duke Odoardo) for Margherita, and prints the funeral oration, headed “La Margarita più del Ciel, che del Mare” (the Pearl of the Sky rather than of the Sea).

Humblest of all is an unrecorded ephemerum, Ein Lied zu singen bey der Beerdigung eines Nachfolgers JEsu Christi (A song to sing at the burial of a follower of Jesus Christ), published around 1785 in Germantown, now a neighborhood of Philadelphia. Seven verses on one page of a small bifolium, it will surely have been handed out graveside at a funeral instead of a more expensive hymnal. Its smallness contrasts with its vocality, filled with exclamations of grief and fervent prayers for salvation.

We would be remiss — blasphemy indeed — not to discuss a single Bible. Although my heart is with a Greek New Testament with a chic Dutch binding, I’ll close with an “immigrant bible,” published not long before the Germantown song, but in Germany rather than in the New World. There’s something to be said for the conservatism of religious printing, to say nothing of the superiority, especially in the XVIIIc, of European printing to American (sorry, not sorry).

Traditionally called the Elector Bible (Kurfürstenbibel), this translation by Martin Luther into German (finished 1534) is an essential document of the Evangelische Kirche — the network of Protestant denominations from the German-speaking world — since Luther encouraged an individual engagement with scripture (see our beautifully-bound example of Luther’s commentary on Psalm 51). Like so many Bibles, ours became a repository of family history, since the major events of life — birth and baptism, marriage and death — call on the book so directly. Ours, however, ends — as shall I — with a fantastical account of a Whitsuntide (seven Sundays from tomorrow) from some 220 years ago, which follows with its original orthography:

May 20 at Witzentide 1804 theare Came in our Meting house whilst we ware at worship a hunting bird into the front door and flue strate to the window at the table right over ware Peter Keyser sets, tho he at that time was gon to the Great Meting and his father Peter Keyser rose and left it out tho he had like to kild it by shoving up the windo it Got between the shaft but he got it out safe & left it fly out of the window

Amen.