Old South Church, Boston opts to sell at auction its copy of Bay Psalm Book (November 2013)

from NY TIMES coverage by Reporter James Barron (Nov. 16 online edition) David N. Redden recited the opening of the 23rd Psalm the way he had memorized it as a child: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.” Then he opened a weathered little book and read the version it contained: “The Lord to mee a ∫hepheard is, want therefore ∫hall not I. Hee in the fold∫ of tender-gra∫∫e, doth cau∫e mee downe to lie.” Those lines were in a volume published in Massachusetts in 1640 that amounted to the Puritans’ religious and cultural manifesto. It was the first book printed in the colonies, and the first book printed in English in the New World. The locksmith who ran the hand-operated press turned out roughly 1,700 copies. The one in Mr. Redden’s hands is one of only 11 known to exist. Mr. Redden, who is the chairman of Sotheby’s books department and has auctioned copies of Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence, among other historic and valuable documents, will sell that copy on Nov. 26, 2013. Sotheby’s expects it to go for $15 million to $30 million, which would make it the most expensive book ever sold at auction — more expensive than a copy of John James Audubon’s “The Birds of America” that sold in December 2010 for $11.54 million (equivalent to $12.39 million in 2013 dollars), the current record. That beat the $7.5 million ($10.77 million today) paid for a copy of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” at Christie’s in London in 1998, and the $6.16 million ($8.14 million today) paid for Shakespeare’s First Folio at Christie’s in New York in 2001. But the Bay Psalm Book, as it is known, has a special place in bibliophiles’ hearts, so much so that Michael Inman, the curator of rare books at the New York Public Library, said the auction was “likely” to set a record, even though the Bay Psalm Book was “not a particularly attractive book” and was “rather shoddily done.” (The library owns one of the other 10 copies.) “It’s what that book symbolizes,” Mr. Inman said. “These 11 copies symbolize the introduction of printing into the British colonies, which was reflective of the importance placed on reading and education by the Puritans and the concept of freely available information, freedom of expression, freedom of the press. All that fed into the revolutionary impulse that gave rise to the United States.” In its way, experts say, the Bay Psalm Book laid the groundwork for famous texts of the Revolution like Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” It followed the first Gutenberg Bibles by more than a century and a half, and it was plagued by spelling problems. The word “psalm,” which is supposed to appear in capital letters at the top of each page, is spelled that way on the left-hand pages, but on the right-hand pages and on the title page, there is an “e” on the end: “The WHOLE Booke of Psalmes Faithfully TRANSLATED into ENGLISH Metre.” The volume also has a subtitle, as important to a religious book in the 17th century as to a 21st-century best-seller: “Whereunto is prefixed a di∫cour∫e declaring not only the lawfullne∫∫, but al∫o the nece∫∫ity of the heavenly Ordinance of ∫inging ∫cripture P∫alme∫ in the Churche∫ of God.” The other copies are all held in libraries or museums. The Library of Congress has one. So does Harvard. So does Yale. And one copy made its way to the place the Puritans had fled — to England, and the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. The copy being sold by Sotheby’s, which the auction house will display in New York on Monday, belongs to Old South Church in Boston, whose long history includes the baptism of Benjamin Franklin when he was a day old. Old South became known as a meeting place for angry colonists before the Boston Tea Party and, more recently, as the church at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The church’s historian, Jeff D. Makholm, resigned from Old South’s leadership in January, several weeks after the congregation voted to sell the book, one of two copies of the Bay Psalm Book that it owns. (Both were part of a collection that the church’s deacons placed in the Boston Public Library in 1866. The other copy is not being sold.) Dr. Makholm had argued that auctioning the Bay Psalm Book to pay for work on the church’s building would “break the hearts” of members’ forebears. “I believe that once a group like that has formed a decision and made it to go forward,” he said this week in a telephone interview, “those of us who disagree, just like those who disagree in Congress — like Tip O’Neill, my congressman, used to say, we go on and we don’t criticize the decision.” He said he hoped the Bay Psalm Book would sell for enough money that the church would not have to go ahead with a plan to sell the silver cups and chalices it once used for communions and baptisms. They have been on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for more than 100 years. The Rev. Nancy S. Taylor, the church’s senior minister and chief executive, said of the decision to sell the Bay Psalm Book, “There was one loud voice against it, our church historian.” The congregation’s vote authorizing the sale was 271 in favor to 34 opposed, far more than the two-thirds necessary. “What you call ‘the controversy’ was a couple of people in that 34 who were very, very vocal,” she said. “The members were pretty clear and I would say are quite unified. They voted it’s not mission-critical to our ministries.” She said the church needed about $7 million for deferred maintenance projects that would be financed from its $23 million endowment. She said the endowment would be replenished with money from the sale. “Our back is not against the wall,” she said. “The Bay Psalm Book is the last stage in a multistep process to put us on the path to sustainability.” The Bay Psalm Book was printed on a press that had been sent over with 240 pounds of paper and one case of type. Like Mr. Inman, Mr. Redden said the workmanship was amateurish — it was, after all, the first book published in the colonies and only the third item to come off the press. “They were kind of learning on the job,” Mr. Redden said, and some of the pages were bound in the wrong order. At the bottom of one, someone wrote, “Turn back a leaf.”