The Bay Psalm Book (1640): The First Book Printed in America
Named for its origin in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the so-called Bay Psalm Book is the first book printed in what is now the United States. Of 1,700 copies printed, only eleven are known to survive. All are in institutional collections: ten in the United States, and the eleventh at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The New York Public Library’s copy is complete but not entirely original. In 1855 the London bookseller Henry Stevens purchased a defective copy at auction, supplying twelve leaves from another incomplete copy (the Livermore–White–Van Sinderen–Library of Congress copy), and had Francis Bedford bind it. Stevens sold the volume to James Lenox, the 19th-century bibliophile who was strongly interested in anything having to do with America and whose great library forms one of the bases upon which The New York Public Library was built.
Translated from the Hebrew and the Greek, the metrical text was written to be sung, and clearly shows many departures from the standard text, such as that of the Twenty-third Psalm (the familiar “The Lord is my shepherd”). These metrical but highly unpoetical versions were produced by the “chief Divines” of the Bay Colony, possibly John Cotton, Richard Mather, John Eliot, and Thomas Weld. Arguably the icon of American printing history, the Bay Psalm Book is not a beautiful book. Printed indifferently, using types brought from England in 1638, it reflects only too well the monochromatic lives of its Puritan creators.
The Whole Booke of Psalmes, Faithfully Translated into English Metre. [Cambridge, Mass.]: Imprinted [by Stephen Daye], 1640.
The New York Public Library, Rare Book Division, from the Lenox Library.
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