When Your Bible Becomes Disbound Don't Throw It Away

This Bible is 60 years old. It has been read most days and has seen better days. It belongs to a very special friend, who used to read this Bible along with her late husband. It is a King James Version, and was published by the National Bible Society of Scotland just after the second world war. My friend was a missionary to India in the early 1960's, and she met her husband there. My friend had this Bible when she went out to India, and they have used it all their married lives, and it shows.

This Bible has been around, and in book seller's discourse, the volume is now disbound. Which is a more gentle way of saying falling to bits, done. The binding is broken, pages are loose and torn, the marbled endpaper is ripped on one side and missing on the other. When it's opened it is quite likely to drop a few pages, and here and there an entire pamphlet is likely to fall out - these are called signatures, a large printed sheet, folded three times, and sewn into the spine. Hard now to use this Bible without having to hold it together, and reading it is a bit of a distraction if as well as meditation on the printed word there also has to be vigilance to prevent it falling apart!

Yes we could have bought my fried a shiny new Bible. A full range available, in any amount of translations and a variety of bindings from leather to hardback, plastic to linen, restrained solemnity of the traditional or multi-coloured options from pink to golden to green, and there's even a camouflage Bible. I joke not. But this is her Bible, replete with memories of countless readings, handled till it feels as familiar as her own hands, opened and closed over a lifetime when it has brought comfort and solace, or questions and upset, read aloud by her or her husband and in the reading the memory of his voice and hers, reciting words that are both prayer and conversation.

This isn't mere book, this is a living repository of a lifetime reading, listening, waiting, questioning, sharing and in all of this the discipline of faith in God who can be heard in these words, and argued with, trusted, and known.

Which is where the ancient craft of bookbinding comes in. Down at the University Bindery there are those who take old worn out books and make them live again. With an inbuilt love of the book as object, and a deep appreciation of the bonds that bind a person to a much loved and well used book, they take dilapidated pages and broken spines and bind them together again into a new usefulness.

Not a new book, a renewed book. And that's what has happened to my friend's Bible which we'll take to her tomorrow. The bookbinder is very busy - a waiting list of weeks to get a book done. But he knew this was a book used most days of the week and every week of every year. One week to the day he phoned to say it was ready.

This post is to say thank you, not only for this Bible of the second chance, but for work that is utterly and gloriously counter-cultural. It's done; throw it away; replace it; get a new one. That's the pared down philosophy of hearts and minds accustomed to newness, novelty and stuff. It's called the consumer culture. No such concessions to built in obsolescence for the bookbinder, who specialises in taking that which is broken, cracked, past it, disbound, and restores it to strength, durability and usefulness again. A bit like God really!!

Comments

[angalmond]

As they used to say "Bibles which are falling apart are usually owned by Christians who aren't!"

I always love any story of redemption and re-creation

[ruthg]

What a lovely account! Thank you