BIBLE SOCIETIES, associations of a philanthropic char acter for translating and circulating the Holy Scriptures. The translation of the Bible has generally followed the expansion of the Church. By the 15th century, versions, more or less complete, existed in manuscript in about 20 languages. The invention of printing aided reprpduction. Probably the first book printed in Europe from movable metal type was the Latin "Mazarin" Bible of c. 1456.
The Reformation greatly quickened men's interest in the Scrip tures, so that notwithstanding the adverse attitude adopted by the Roman Church at and after the Council of Trent, the trans lation and circulation of the Bible made rapid progress. The pace was still further. accelerated by the growth of modern Christian missions to non-Christian lands, for missionaries, especially those of Protestant Churches, have been among the most skilful trans lators and the most assiduous distributors of the Bible. Thus the earliest complete Arabic Bible was produced at Rome in 1671 by the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. The Tamil Bible, the earliest in any language of India, translated by two Danish Lutheran missionaries, Ziegenbalg and Schultze, was pub lished 1715-28 with the assistance of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. It is estimated that by 1800 the whole or some part of the Bible had been printed in 71 languages, by 19oo in 567 and by 1928 in 856.
The Reformation also brought an element of philanthropy into circulation of the Scriptures. Thus, on the verso of the title page of the revised French Geneva Bible of 1588 there is a note that the expenses of the work, which was printed at the same time in three different forms to suit all kinds of persons, were liberally provided by certain good people not in order to gain profit for themselves but solely to serve God and His Church. Similarly, the Corporation for the Promoting and Propagating of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England (founded in 1649) bore the expense of printing both the New Testament and the whole Bible (Cambridge, Mass., 1663—the earliest Bible printed in America), which John Eliot, one of the Pilgrim Fathers, translated into "the language of the Massachusetts Indians" whom he evangelized. Again, The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (founded 1698) has done much to cheapen and multiply copies of the Scrip tures, not only in English and Welsh, but in many foreign lan guages. In the present century, however, apart from its general literary activities, it has concentrated on the provision of Prayer Books and helps to Bible study in Asiatic and African languages.
The earliest noteworthy organization, formed for the specific purpose of circulating the Scriptures, was the Canstein Bible Insti tute, founded in 1710 at Halle, in Saxony, by Karl Hildebrand, Baron von Canstein 0667-1719), who was associated with some of the leaders of Pietism in Germany. He invented a method of printing whereby the institute could produce Bibles and Testa ments in Luther's version at low cost and sell them cheaply. In 1722 editions of the Scriptures were also issued in Bohemian and Polish. In England various Christian organizations, which arose out of the evangelical movement in the i8th century, took part in the work. One such was founded in 1780 under the name of the Bible Society, but as its sphere was restricted to soldiers and sea men the title was afterwards changed to the Naval and Military Bible Society. The French Bible Society was instituted in 1792, but its designs were wrecked by the outbreak of the Revolution, and it was finally dissolved in i8o3.
By one of its original laws the society could circulate no copies of the Scriptures in English except in King James' Version, but in i9oi this law was widened to include the Revised Version. In other languages the society has from the first successfully laboured to promote new and improved versions. By March 31, 1928, it had circulated versions in 6o8 languages, the complete Bible in 145, the New Testament in 146 more, and at least one complete book of the Bible in the remaining 317. In all but about 4o cases it was the actual publisher. Translations or revisions in scores of languages are constantly being carried on by companies of scholars and repre sentative missionaries under the society's auspices and often at its expense. New versions are made, wherever practicable, from the Hebrew or Greek text. The society's interdenominational charac ter has commonly secured the acceptance of the same version by missions of different Churches working side by side.
Except under special circumstances the society does not encour age free distribution. It prefers to provide numerous editions at prices below the cost of production and within the reach of the poor, and makes further concessions to religious and philanthropic agencies. Its total issues from i8o4 to 1928 were over 385 million. Of the 9,936,714 volumes issued in 1927-28, 3,790,275 were sent out from the London Bible House; 2,178,726 were in English; about 1,598,000 were circulated in Continental Europe; 442,000 in Africa; 1,075,000 in India and Ceylon; 3,640,30o in China ; 986, 000 in Japan and Korea; 473,0oo in South America. The society owns 53 Bible houses and residences in the principal cities of the world, and rents depots in many others. It employs about goo colporteurs. Its total income in 1927-28 was 4.17,295 and its expenditure 4'1,817.
Some of these societies are still at work. The circulation effected by the German Bible societies in 1927 was as follows : Wurttem berg Bible Inititute (Stuttgart), 521,858; Prussian Bible Society (Berlin), 162,517; Berg Bible Society (Elberfeld), 191,474; Can stein Bible Institute (Halle), and smaller societies, 139,000.
Noteworthy versions of the Bible, such as those in Arabic, Armenian, Zulu, several dialects of Chinese, a number of Ameri can Indian, Philippine, Micronesian and African languages, have appeared under the auspices of the American Bible Society. It has shared jointly with the British and Foreign and the Scottish Bible Societies in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish Ver sions. Up to Dec. 1927, it had participated in the translation, printing or distribution of the Scriptures in 295 languages includ ing various systems for the blind.
The purpose and work of the society is entirely missionary. It supplies the Scriptures without purpose of profit and largely through whole or part donations. It has 12 foreign agencies through which it works in Central and South America, the West Indies, the Levant, the Philippines, Siam, China and Japan. It has ten home agencies covering the United States, with head quarters at New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Richmond, Cin cinnati, Chicago, Dallas, Denver and San Francisco ; the agency among the coloured people also centring in New York. The ap propriations for 1928 were $1,345,426. During 1927, it issued Bibles, Testaments and Portions, about half of which were for use in the United States and half for other countries. The total issues of the society since 1816 to the end of 1927 were volumes.
(a) In transcribing the title-page and other parts of the book the opening words should be given in full, any subsequent omis sions being indicated by three dots placed close together. The end of a line should be indicated by an upright stroke, or in early books with the old long commas by double strokes to avoid con fusion with these. It is a considerable gain to indicate to the eye the types in which the words are printed, i.e., whether in roman, gothic letter or italic, and in each case whether in majuscules or minuscules. This, however, increases both the cost of printing and risk of error. In books before 1641, if upper-case letters are trans literated into lower the printer's own practice as to initial and medial i and j, a and v should be followed. Misprints in the original title should be reproduced either with a following [sic] or preferably with a footnote to the description.
(b) The "size" of a book was originally a technical expression for the relation of the individual leaves to the sheet of paper of which they formed a part. A book in-folio meant one in which the paper had been folded once, so that each sheet had made two leaves. In a book in-quarto each sheet had been folded twice so as to make four leaves. In an octavo another fold had produced eight leaves, and so on for books in 16mo, 32mo and 64mo. For books in twelves, twenty-fours, etc., the paper had at some stage to be folded in three instead of two, and their form differed according to the way in which this had been done. The size of old books can mostly be ascertained by noting whether the thicker white lines visible in the paper when held up to the light run perpendicularly or horizontally. These wire-lines (so called from being made by the wires of the trays in which paper was made) run perpendicu larly in folios and octavos, horizontally in quartos and sextodec imos. In tall duodecimos they are perpendicular, in "dumpy" ones horizontal. In small quartos and the lesser sizes only one sheet was usually sewn at a time, so that the number of leaves corresponds with the name of the size ; in folios and large quartos, to reduce the amount of sewing, one or more additional sheets were placed inside the first, so that the earliest folios often have ten leaves in the quire, and the earliest large quartos eight.
When a ms. or early printed book was being prepared for bind ing it was usual for the order in which the quires or gatherings were to be arranged to be indicated by signing them with the let ters of the alphabet in their order, the alphabet generally used being the Latin, in which I stands for both I and J ; V for both U and V, and there is no W. If more than 23 letters were heeded the contractions for et, con, rum and (less often) that for us, were used as additional signs, and for large books minuscules were used as well as majuscules, and the letters were doubled. In 1472 printed signatures are found and they are still in use. If the quires or gatherings in the book to be described are signed in print, the signatures used should be quoted without brackets. If they are not signed, the order of the gatherings should be noted by the letters of the alphabet in square brackets. In each case the number of leaves in each gathering should be shown by index figures. Thus, six gatherings of eight leaves followed by one of f our should be represented by the symbols The "make up" of an old book in original binding is usually sufficiently shown by the strings in the middle of each quire. In re-bound copies of old folios and quartos the best guide to it is to note the sequence of the watermarks, i.e., the devices with which the papermaker as a rule marked each sheet (see PAPER). In a folio book one of every pair of leaves should have a watermark in the middle of the paper. In a quarto some pairs of leaves will have no watermark; in others it will be found divided by the f old of the paper.
After the size and sequence of the gatherings has been stated the total number of leaves should be noted, with a mention of any numeration of them given in the book. Errors in the printed numeration of the leaves of old books are common, and it is seldom necessary to point them out in detail. Printed leaf numer ation is found as early as 147o, and became common about ten years later. Printed pagination did not become common till nearly the middle of the i6th century.
The foregoing details are all directed to showing which leaves of a book would be printed by the same pull of the press, how it was made up for binding, and how imperfections in any copy may be detected. They give little or no indication of the dimen sions of the book, and it is therefore necessary to add the meas urements in inches or millimetres of a page of an uncut copy. In old books uncut copies are not easily found, and it is useful in stead of this to give the measurement in millimetres of the printed portion of the page (technically called the "type-page"), from which, if the habits of the printer are known, the size of an uncut copy can usually be deduced. To this is added a statement of the number of lines in the page measured. The character of the type (roman, gothic or italic) is next mentioned, and in the case of Zsth-century books the measurement of 20 lines of type. Finally, a reference to any authoritative description already printed com pletes this portion of the entry. Thus the description of the colla tion of the first-dated book printed at Augsburg, the Meditationes of S. Bonaventura, printed by Gunther Zainer in 1468, should read: Folio, 72 leaves. Type-page 205X 122 mm. ; 35 lines. Type 1 (gothic letter, 117 mm.) . Hain *3557.
(c) While many books, especially early ones, contain little or nothing beyond the bare text of a well-known work, others are well provided, not only, with commentaries which are almost sure to be mentioned on the title-page, or in the colophon (which the editor himself often wrote), but also with dedicatory letters, pref aces, complimentary verses, indexes and other accessories, the presence of which it is desirable to indicate. In these cases it is often convenient to show the entire contents of the book in the order in which they occur, noting the leaves or pages on which each begins. Thus in the first edition (159o) of the first three books of Spenser's Faerie Queene, the literary contents, their order and the space they occupy can be concisely noted by taking the successive gatherings according to their signatures and show ing what comes on each page. Thus : recto, title ; verso, dedi cation, "To the Most Mightie and Magnificent Empresse Eliza beth"; A.,-Oo,, text of books i.–iii. ; letter dated Jan. 23, 1589 [ 1590] to Sir Walter Raleigh expounding the intention of the work; verso, commendatory verses signed W. R[aleigh], Hob-ynoll (Gabriel Harvey), R.S., H.B., W.L. and Ignoto; complimentary sonnets severally inscribed to Sir C. Hatton, the earls of Essex, Oxford, Northumberland and Ormond, Lord Ch. Howard, Lord Grey of Wilton and Sir W. Raleigh, and to Lady Carew and to the Ladies in the Court; and "Faults escaped in the print"; Qq,.,, 15 other sonnets.
Collation helps also to determine the order of undated edi tions, since in reprints a printer had opportunities, which he sel dom failed to use, of saving space here and there and so reducing his bills for paper and presswork, and could also set up the suc cessive sheets of preliminaries and text consecutively in their order instead of printing text first and preliminaries after as was usual in first editions. It may even discover evidence of authorship, as when Skeat found that the initial letters of suc cessive chapters of the Testament of Love made up a sentence, and Henry Bradley by correcting a wrong arrangement of the sheets showed that the sentence implied the authorship of the book by Thomas Usk, and thus relieved Chaucer, to whom it had most injuriously been attributed, of the burden of it. Collation also brings to light irregularities in the sequence of the sheets of which a book is composed, which can be traced to of ter-thoughts of the publisher or author, necessitating the insertion of additional leaves and sometimes also the excision of others already printed. Thus, as originally printed, the first sheet of the 1609 quarto of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cresseida consisted of a title-page, be ginning "The Historie of Troylus and Cresseida. As it was acted by the Kings Majesties seruants at the Globe," and three leaves of text. The title-leaf was subsequently cut out and two leaves (a half-sheet) substituted, the first bearing a new title, the sec ond (with signature 412) a preface stating that this was "a new play, never stal'd with the Stage." Literary students had long dis puted as to which of these variants was the earlier, but the bib liographical evidence is decisive. So again, variations between different copies of the first edition of Herrick's Hesperides (1648), which had puzzled his editors, are easily explained as due to the presence of three such cancels. In the 18th century resort to cancels was extraordinarily frequent, and it still occurs. Owing to the extreme slowness of the presswork of the early printers there were more opportunities in their days for making correc tions and alterations while a book was still passing through the press than there are now. Thus the first printer at Mainz can be shown to have increased the size of the edition of the first great Latin Bible after a start had been made, so that a few of the leaves are found in two states owing to additional copies having been printed after the type of the first setting had been dispersed, and of the extant copies of the first quartos of Shakespeare's Richard II. (1J97) and King Lear (16o8) some have corrected readings on certain leaves which in others are left uncorrected.
On the other hand the leather inking-balls used by the pressmen sometimes caught up one or more pieces of type from the forme and if these were replaced wrongly the sheets subsequently printed would have incorrect readings instead of correct ones, and some of the small variations noticed its different copies of the First Folio Shakespeare and again in the first edition of Milton's Paradise Lost have been ascribed to this cause. All the sheets, correct or incorrect, would be used indiscriminately when the book came to be bound, and thus it has been said with some approach to truth that no two copies of an Elizabethan book are absolutely identical. These minor variations thus only consti tute different "states" of the leaves or sheets on which they oc cur, while the substitution of a different title-page, as in the 1609 Troilus mentioned above, constitutes a different "issue," both "states" and "issues" being parts of one and the same "edition." Enumeration and Arrangement.—If every book bore the true name of its author, the correct date and place of its pub lication, and the names of its printer and publisher, and no mishaps occurred in the course of printing and publication, it would still remain the task of what is here called formal bibli ography to collect information as to all the books written by a certain author, or printed by a certain printer, or published in a certain city or country, and arrange them in chronological order under the names of the author, or the printer, or the city or country, according to the plan undertaken. The ideal to which bibliography of this kind is directed is the compilation for each country of a national register of its literature in the form of annals of publication with indexes of authors and (in so far as they are of interest) of printers and publishers, illustrators and any other persons connected with the book, so that under the name of each all their contributions would be shown. The old ideal was directed to a universal register of books, and for those published in the 15th century the zeal of students of early print ing has provided the material for an almost exhaustive list, the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (see INCUNABULA). Of those printed in the years 1501-36 there is a tentative enumeration in the continuation of Panzer's Annales Typographici (1803), and materials are gradually being collected for improving and extend ing this. But the projects once formed for a universal bibliogra phy have dwindled in proportion as the output of the press has increased, and the nearest approaches to such a work are the printed catalogue of the library of the British Museum, and that of the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris, now in progress. When a universal bibliography was recognized as an impossibility patri otism suggested the compilation of national bibliographies, and the Bibliotheca Britannica of Robert Watt (Edinburgh, 1824) remains an extraordinary example of what the zeal of a single man could accomplish in this direction. Querard's La France lit teraire (1827-39), while it gives fuller titles, is much less com prehensive, embracing mainly books of the i8th and early 19th centuries, and only a selection of these. In the works of Heinsius (Allgemeines Biicherlexikon, 1700-1815, Leipzig, 1812-17) and Kayser (Biicherlexikon, 175o, etc., Leipzig, 1834, etc.) Germany possesses a fine record of her output of books during the last two centuries, and since the organization of the book-trade contempo rary lists of books, with résumés and indexes issued at intervals, exist for most European countries. For English books up to the close of the year 5640, with the aid of catalogues previously pub lished by the British Museum, the Cambridge university library, and other institutions, a Short-title Catalogue was compiled by members of the Bibliographical Society and issued in 1926. This comprises over 26,000 entries and gives references to libraries in which copies are preserved.
The only competent treatise on the bibliography of the form of books is An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students, by R. B. McKerrow (1927), based on a paper entitled Notes on Bib liographical Evidence for Literary Students and Editors of English Works of the 26th and 17th Centuries. read before the Bibliographical Society in 1913. See also F. Madan's paper On Method in Bibliog raphy, in vol. i. of the Society's Transactions (1893) , and Some Points in Bibliographical Descriptions, by A. W. Pollard and W. W. Greg, and a memorandum on Degressive Bibliography, by F. Madan in vol. ix. (1909). Subject-bibliographies will be found listed at the beginning of the entries of books on the subjects with which they are concerned in the successive volumes of the British Museum's Subject-Index of the Modern Works added to the Library. For books published before its issue W. P. Courtney's A Register of National Bibliography, with a selection of the chief bibliographical works and articles printed in other countries (19o5) is still useful. (A. W. P.)