Printing
The first edition was a run of 2,500 copies that were begun in Paris in 1539. Much of the printing was done at Paris, and after some misadventures where the printed sheets were seized by the French authorities on grounds of heresy (since relations between England and France were somewhat troubled at this time), the publication was completed in London in April 1539. It went through six subsequent revisions between 1540 and 1541. The second edition of 1540, included a preface by Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, recommending the reading of the scriptures. (Cranmer’s preface was also included in the front of the Bishops' Bible.)
A version of Cranmer's Great Bible can be found included in the English Hexapla, produced by Samuel Baxter & Sons in 1841. However copies of this work are fairly rare.
The most available reprinting of the Great Bible's New Testament (minus its marginal notes) can be found in the second column of the New Testament Octapla edited by Luther Weigle, chairman of the translation committee that produced the Revised Standard Version.
Read more about this topic: Great Bible
Famous quotes containing the word printing:
“It seems not more reasonable to leave the right of printing unrestrained, because writers may be afterwards censured, than it would be to sleep with doors unbolted, because by our laws we can hang a thief.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)