A Well-worn Testament To The Printed Word

The Sunday Age

Sunday August 15, 1999

WARWICK McFADYEN

THE words sprawl across the brittle page, the ink faded to a light brown. Two marks of possession written slowly and generously (you can almost feel the deliberation in the strokes) among thousands of other words in this one book.

It sits awkwardly, this mudbrick of a book, beside the humming computer, beneath the monitor's pixellated light. It is an outsider: a time traveller - 338 years of travelling, to be precise - from England through family connections to Melbourne.

It is a bible - born in a world lit only by fire, to steal the title of author William Manchester's study of the Middle Ages - and now exposed to the illuminations of the modern world. There is no virtual reality about it; indeed, it could never reside in cyberspace. It is too big. It pulls the soft, micro light into its centre, and extinguishes it. Within its hundreds of pages exists a universe, alien and unknowable to this age. Webpages need electricity; their lifeblood is not their own. This mudbrick of a book needs nothing.

But, to image-conscious eyes, it is a poor excuse for a book; its spine, back and front are shades of brown. It gives away nothing. It is not the Book of Kells; more the everyman's version for the everyday grind. Its pages are less than wafer thin and a color to match its exterior; the type is grey and tiny, varying in different sections. It has illustrations on only two pages out of hundreds. One says this: ``The Holy Bible containing the Old Testament and the New. Newly translated out of the original Tongues. And with the former translations diligently compared and revised. Cambridge. Printed by John Field, printer to universitie 1661."

How far it has travelled. Think of the oldest book in your house. Now, think of this. Turn off your computer. Go past the Second World War, the First World War and the Great Depression. Keep going back, past Queen Victoria, the Industrial Revolution, past the days of Empire, the leaving of the First Fleet. Past the French Revolution. Draw a breath, and keep moving backwards, past these literary ghosts Samuel Johnson Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, Robert Burns and Henry Fielding. The latter was born two years after Mary Pain wrote her name in it.

Step lightly into the printing rooms of John Field, and see there, in 1661, a bible, perhaps this one, being made. Field was originally a bookseller and joined Edward Husbands as Printer to the Parliament in 1649, he was also appointed printer to Oliver Cromwell. He was appointed by Grace printer to the University of Cambridge in 1655. Field printed many editions of the Bible, many of which ``were noted for the number and variety of the misprints, the general badness of the printing, and their excessive price", according to Plomer's Dictionary of Booksellers & Printers. He died in 1668.

Despite all this, it still offers daily guidance for the faithful. It impinges upon the reader's world in a manner quite alien to the citizens of this new millennium. There are prayers for fair weather (``we humbly beseech thee, that though we for our iniquities have worthily deserved a plague of rain and waters, yet upon our true repentance thou wilt send us such weather as that we may receive the fruits of the earth in due season"); in the time of dearth and famine (``behold, we beseech thee the afflictions of thy people and grant that the scarcity and dearth [for which we do now most justly suffer for our iniquity] may through thy goodess be mercifully turned into cheapness and plenty"); in the time of war and tumults; in the time of any common plague or sickness and for the monarchy: a prayer for the kings majesty (``most hearilty we beseech thee with thy favor to behold our most gracious soveraign lord King Charles; we humbly beseech thee to bless our gracious Queen Catherine, Mary the Queen Mother, James Duke of York and all the Royal Family.")

The citizens of the new millennium might call these prayers pitiful ignorance; in the late 1600s, their fate interwoven with them, they would call them faith. Among the pages of this mudbrick of a book, they would see the signature of God upon their lives.