King James Version New Testament William Collins

Printed in Glasgow by William Collins, Sons, and Company sometime in the early 1860s, this compact Victorian New Testament is a product of one of the great periods in Scottish Bible publishing. Collins was among the most important Bible printers of the century, licensed to produce scripture through the Bible Board of Scotland and central to the broad distribution of devotional texts across the British Isles and beyond. A pocket copy like this was not meant for the pulpit. It was meant for a coat pocket, a bedside table, a journey.

What makes it stand apart from the plain utility copies of the period is the dressing. The boards are covered in a green tartan-pattern cloth with a handsomely gilt-tooled black spine and all edges gilded, every element quietly signaling that this was made to be given, kept, and admired as well as read. It is a small object with a great deal of considered ornament, and that combination, compact format, Scottish imprint, decorative cloth boards, gilt edges, has made Victorian pocket devotionals like this one consistently appealing to several kinds of collector at once.

Tucked between the pages of First Corinthians, someone left a pressed flower, four petals dried to a warm honey brown, still holding their shape after what may be well over a century.There is an ink ownership inscription on the front blank that I have not been fully able to read from the images to hand, and together these two traces of a former life give this little volume a quality that no amount of fine binding alone can supply.