Do hens have hands?
Adam Smyth
- BuyThe Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe (Panizzi Lectures) by Anthony Grafton
British Library, 144 pp, £30.00, September 2011, ISBN 978 0 7123 5845 3
When the King’s printer Robert Barker produced a new edition of the King James Bible in 1631, he overlooked three letters from the seventh commandment, producing the startling injunction: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ Barker was fined £300, and spent the rest of his life in debtors’ prison, even while his name remained on imprints. ‘I knew the tyme when great care was had about printing,’ the Archbishop of Canterbury lamented, ‘but now the paper is nought, the composers boyes, and the correctors unlearned.’ Most copies of what became known as the Wicked, Adulterous or Sinners’ Bible were promptly burned, but a few survive as collectors’ items, their value raised immeasurably by Barker’s error: one featured in an exhibition at the Bodleian Library last year about the making of the King James Bible.[*]
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[*] The exhibition catalogue is Manifold Greatness: The Making of the King James Bible, edited by Helen Moore and Julian Reid (Bodleian Library, 208 pp., £19.99, April 2011, 978 1 85124 349 5).
Vol. 34 No. 13 · 5 July 2012 » Adam Smyth » Do hens have hands?
pages 26-28 | 3176 words