Letter to the Editor: Early English Bibles in town libraries (part one)

There must be many copies of early English Bibles in the basements and other generally inaccessible rooms of town libraries. I have recently listed the Scriptures in Saffron Walden Town Library and in Wisbech & Fenland Museum. The latter houses two libraries, its own and the Town Library, which are accessible only with special permission.

Saffron Walden Town Library has:

• an incomplete Coverdale(1550),
• Taverner-Tyndale (1551),
• four editions of the Geneva Version (1570, ?1601, 1602, 1611) and
• two of Geneva-Tomson-Junius (1599, 1611),
• two Bishops' Bibles (1572, 1588),
• an imperfect first edition and a complete second edition of the Rheims New Testament
• and a 1611 'He' Bible.

Wisbech & Fenland Museum has in its two libraries:

• a very incomplete Great Bible (1553),
• three Geneva Bibles (1560, the first edition — unfortunately the maps have been removed, 1588, 1615), and
• two 'She' Bibles (1611/1613).

• There is a reprint of Cromwell's Souldiers Pocket Bible,
• a copy of the 1617 edition of William Fulke's The text of the New Testament in which he compares 'The translation of the Church of England' (i.e. the Bishops' Bible) with the Rheims New Testament,
• Henry Hammond's A paraphrase and annotations upon... the New Testament (1653) and
• a fine Baskerville Cambridge Bible (1763), described in DNB as 'one of the finest English Bibles ever produced'.