Article December 6, 1900 Issue

Popularity of the Bible

New York Sun

London, October 27.—Statistics issued this week show a vast increase in the circulation of the Bible. It has been stated that the opposite is the case in the United States, where publishers and booksellers are cited as having said "there is no money in the Scriptures." A talk with Mr. Henry Frowde of the Oxford University Press corrects this statement very materially. He says it is true that the business of some American publishers has been largely reduced, but this is not result of any falling off in the popularity of the Bible in America. The explanation given is that new and more economical machinery has been introduced by other publishers of the Bible. Never was there, he says, such a demand for Bibles as at present; three times as many Oxford Bibles have been sold as in any previous year. The British and Foreign Bible Society, which prints the Scriptures in four hundred languages, representing the speech of seven tenths of the world, issued in the twelve months ending with last March 5,047,000 copies the Bible—a bulk absolutely without precedent and considerably more than half a million in excess of the corresponding period previously. Of that huge mass, over thirty per cent or 1,521,000 copies are in English.

In themselves those figures are sufficiently significant, but even more striking is the record privately compiled and not yet published, of the growth during the last decade. In 1889—90 the number of complete English Bibles sent out was 534,980. Each year showed a consistent, steady rise up to last year, when it was 618,215. Ten years ago the New Testaments were 599,613, and last year 614,719, the intervening figures having somewhat fluctuated with a general tendecy to increase. Of portions of the Scriptures, such as the Psalms or the Gospels, twenty-five thousand were issued in 1889—90, and last year they numbered 467,482, not a little of that great increase being due to the fact that one hundred and twenty-six thousand copies were distributed to the troops as they left these shores for South Africa. The penny English New Testament is sold at less than cost price. Since it was first brought out in 1894 over seven million copies have been issued at a loss of £25,000, as it cannot possibly be produced at its selling price. At the Oxford and Cambridge University Presses which, together with the Queen's Printers, alone have the right of printing the Bible in this country, the finest typography, the choicest paper, and most artistic of bindings are requisitioned for the sacred volume, and there is not the slightest diminution to be observed in the demand for sumptuous copies.

Mr. Frowde says that the total annual output of Oxford Bibles for some years past has been upward of a million copies, and even before there was an American branch of the Oxford University Press, the weekly shipment of Bibles to the United States often exceeded five tons in weight. The Americans take the keenest interest in Bibles and Biblical matters, as was shown very clearly at the time of the publication of the revised Testaments. Not only the authorized Bible holds its own, but the revised version is slowly but steadily increasing in popularity.

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