The Comprehensive Bible

BAGSTER'S COMPREHENSIVE BIBLE, THE FIRST EDITION OF THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH WITH THE MOST RENOWNED COMMENTARIES EXTANT AND AN IMPRESSIVE APPARATUS OF REFERENCES

[Bible]. Holy Bible. London, Samuel Bagster, [1827].

Folio, brown morocco binding with plenty of blind-tooled decorations to covers and spine, gilt titles at second compartment, gilt edges, purple fly-leaves.

Elegant and impressive edition of Bagster's Comprehensive Bible, the Authorized Version edited by William Greenfield, with the most important apparatus of notes extant at the time.

At Bagster's time, the production of English bibles was a monopoly in the United Kingdom, confined in England to the king's printer and the two great universities. This patent did not apply to bibles printed with notes. What Samuel Bagster thought, also considering the costliness of polyglot bibles, was to supply the want of a handy and inexpensive editions by printing polyglot bibles with both the English text and references for those who need them. Bagster brought out in 1816 ‘The English version of the polyglot bible’ (with a preface by T. Chevalier), containing a selection of over 60,000 parallel references, mainly selected and all verified by himself.

In 1822 Bagster made the acquaintance of the self-taught Orientalist, William Greenfield, who in 1827 edited for the publisher his ‘Comprehensive Bible,’ with 4,000 illustrative notes, 500,000 marginal references, a general introduction, and a variety of other useful information. This apparatus, based on the dictates of comparative philology and thus as scientific as possible, made this very same edition, the best critical edition of the Bible until its time.