Good News: The Afterlife of Tyndale’s Bible

Five hundred years ago, in the early spring of 1526, browsers at the booksellers’ stalls clustered in the narrow lanes that wove around old St Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London noticed a new offering. It was a fat little book, 700 pages in a small format, no bigger than an adult’s hand, and on the face of it, quite unassuming. While there was an elegant, architectural design on the title page, there was no author’s or printer’s name and no date. Inside there were none of the full-page woodcut illustrations which were then becoming increasingly common for editions of popular works backed by influential and wealthy patrons. There was no shortage of copies; someone had anticipated a ready readership and somewhere found the money to pay for a print-run of several thousand. Those who knew these backstreet bookmen best might also soon have realised there was more to it than met the eye because it was the dealers already notorious for trading in foreign imprints whose stock was piled especially high.