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Explore the World’s Most Expensive Printed Book: The Bay Psalm Book

 

Fan of the long s? Then you should enjoy the finging the pfalmes from the most expensive book ever published. Read on for some interesting facts about this record-setting publication and how you can perufe every page:

Bay Psalm Book Preface

The Bay Psalm book, a small Psalter, holds two world records. It was the first book printed in British North America, of which only 11 are known to exist, and now it has sold at Sotheby’s in New York City, for the highest price ever.

  • The price? $14,165,000, which was actually lower than some pre-auction estimates that ranged as high as $30 million.
  • The new owner? David Rubenstein, entrepreneur and philanthropist, plans to generously lend the book to libraries and exhibits. Rubenstein also bought a copy of the Magna Carta in 2007 for $21 million.
  • The printer? This book was, amazingly, printed a mere 20 years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock by Stephen Day, the first colonial American printer.
  • 1,700 copies were originally printed. Only 11 are known to still exist.
  • The previous highest price paid for a Bay Psalm book? $151,000 in 1947. At the time, that was also a record for a printed book. Quite an appreciation in value!
  • Sotheby’s website includes fascinating detail about the publisher, printer and the creation of the book, its many errors and other printing details. If you are a printer, you’ll find out all about everything from watermarks, hyphenation and typesetting to quartos, folios and financing.
  • Typos? Oh yes. Even at the time, the Bay Psalm book was criticized for its poor quality of printing and abundant errors. Misspellings, inverted commas instead of apostrophes, uneven inking…. nobody’s perfect, right? A critic, over 200 years ago, noted the book “abounds with typographical errors” and said the printer “must have been wholly unacquainted with punctuation.” (source)  Ouch.
  • Other firsts in 1640? The first Finnish university was founded in the city of Turku. The first European coffee house opened in Venice. Charles I (another first) was on the English throne.

And best of all… you can study every page of the Bay Psalm book online for free, courtesy of the Old South Church in Boston (the same church where Benjamin Franklin was baptized).

Digital Bay Psalm Book

 

 

 

ImageSmith is proud to be a printer in an exciting era of digital communication. Your printer should be able to provide you with the latest information, inspiration, technical advice, and innovative ideas for communicating your message through print, design and typography, signage, apparel, variable data printing and direct mail, integrated marketing and environmental responsible printing. They should also be able to work with you to solve any difficult prepress issues with your files. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!

Call us at 828.684.4512. ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your print and marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
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The John Lennon Letters: When Your Whole Life is on Paper

Lennon and Life on Paper

“I don’t keep a diary and I throw away nearly all the paper I might have kept. I don’t keep an archive. There’s something worrying about my make-up that I try to leave no trace of myself apart from my plays. “
– Tom Stoppard

 

Our lives on paper live on after we are gone. And if you are famous, every scrap of paper will be saved. A newly released collection of correspondence entitled The John Lennon Letters, edited by Lennon biographer Hunter Davies, contains over 400 pages of annotated correspondence from Lennon. (Hardcover, Little, Brown and Company,  list price 29.99) Most reviewers, however, note that practically all informative correspondence from Lennon had already been published, and Davies collection is being skewered by the critics as a “scraping of the bottom of the barrel” – an attempt to profit from anything written by the hand of the famous Beatle. Here is a painstakingly organized collection of letters, notes, post-its, postcards and paper scraps that seems in total to reveal very little others than mundane details of the former Beatles’ daily life and some not-so-flattering personal qualities. Reviewer Neil McCormick of The Telegraph says all we really learn about Lennon from this mountain of paper is: “Well, he couldn’t spell. He liked to doodle. And he had way too much spare time on his hands.”

Not exactly a glowing review. Often the correspondence of famous people, whether writers, musicians or politicians, contains a wealth of valuable insight and factual data about the person’s life, private thoughts, emotional state and philosophy of life. Successfully published collections include the letters of Emily Dickinson, Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Richard Nixon… and a long list of works that have made many publishers very happy. In many cases, the only hard evidence we have of the private thoughts and feelings of these luminaries are in the archive of their journals, correspondence and personal papers.

However, we are leaving less and less of a paper trail through life. I wonder how in the digital age the role of paper will be different for the famous and infamous. Libraries and historical societies collect the correspondence of great thinkers, artists and politicians to serve as a primary source for further research. Even bar napkins, margin notes scribbled in books, newspaper clippings or anything bearing the subject’s handwriting is considered significant. But we put less of those things onto paper now than ever before. As our ‘footprints’ become increasingly virtual rather than physical, will these archives be data banks rather than stacks of paper? Will they catalogue blogs, emails, Twitter timelines, social media connections and text messages? Will people, wary of a lack of security when “writing” on a computer, still keep private handwritten journals or diaries?

And what about the rest of us? Are we leaving behind us a trail of thoughts, words and feelings that can be accumulated, researched and categorized without our control or input? The days of tossing the diary into the fire or shoving documents through a paper shredder to hide them for eternity seem to be gone. It will take newly refined skills in research and interpretation to assess the changing archive of information we leave behind as everything from our important documents to our shopping lists live on in computer memory.

 

Printer’s love paper. They also love the exciting new means of communication and marketing in an interconnected world. Your printer should be able to provide you with everything from encouragement all the way to the complete design, layout, copywriting, production, multi-purposing and distribution of your marketing outreach. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!

ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
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Judging by the Cover: Memorable Book Cover Design

Judging a book by its cover is, in most cases, not a wise idea. But that old adage tends to diminish the importance that a cover plays in the interaction we have with a book. Judging by the cover may be unwise, but the impression a cover gives is very influential. The very mention of a book title can immediately brings to mind the image of its cover – that image becomes tied to the work, the author, the experience of reading the novel. Below are a few samples that got impressed into my memory over the years:

Book Cover Design

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

The cover was painted by Francis Cugat, and it is said that Fitzgerald was so enamored with the work (which was completed before he had finished his novel) that he incorporated it into his story. Entitled “Celestial Eyes,” it is probably one of the most iconic and best known covers in publishing history.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute – Grace Paley

Edward Hopper’s “Compartment C, Car 293,” an oil painting of a young woman reading on a train, is a beautiful illustration for Gracy Paley’s collection of short stories, all set in New York. Once read, its hard not to see Paley’s narrator Faith as the woman on the train.

Salinger and Burgess

A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
and The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger

Such simliar covers for two very different books. The straightforward serif font in yellow on a classic crimson background reveals very little about the story inside Catcher in the Rye, yet is without a doubt inextricably tied to the story in the minds of millions of readers. Similarly Burgess’ futuristic distopian thriller could seem almost too bizarre to evoke in such a simple cover. Amazing how the simple skewing of the sans serif title diagonally across the orange background does the job wonderfully.

Examples of Book Cover Design

The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway and
Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner

Two favorite novels of mine – but not what I would consider great book covers. In a way, they seem lazy – almost as if someone decided “Hey, this image will work, won’t it?” But these two images are what springs to mind whenever I hear these titles. Would a better choice have made for a better reading experience as well?

Book Cover Design from Classic Paintings

It’s interesting to notice the frequency with which classic paintings by great masters, that generally have nothing to do with the novel they are chosen to represent, are so often the choice for cover designs – and are an uncannily perfect fit. Penguin Classics is one publisher that relies heavily on this technique, finding classic portraits that seem to perfectly represent the character in a novel.

 

In my opinion, the best book cover designs often lean toward simplicity and minimalism. There is something powerful in sensing the feel or meaning of a novel’s theme in just the barest of images, or color, or font placement… a simple, eloquent cover that hints at the complexity within. (Regardless of the cover, if you haven’t read the novels above, do yourself a favor and check them out. All great reads.)

 

Rely on your printer for advice and direction in design and branding decisions. They have years of experience working with the entire gamut of design trends and tastes. If they can’t help you, they will know who can! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!

ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.