J. Mark Bertrand writes for Lectio about a gorgeous new edition of the Bible:
When 2014’s Kickstarter sensation Bibliotheca finally delivered at the end of last year, I called its creator, Adam Lewis Greene. […] The longer you have to wait, the more your expectations build. And the higher your expectations, the greater the risk of disappointment. The unexpected popularity of the Bibliotheca project on Kickstarter brought a whole genre of Bibles — the multi-volume, reader-friendly kind — out of the archive of past ideas. Before, the conventional wisdom had been that nobody wanted a beautifully designed and produced edition of Scripture separated into volumes so as to do away with the necessity for super-thin pages and super-small print. (Or at least, nobody wanted to pay for it.) When Bibliotheca raised nearly $1.5 million for exactly such an edition, the conventional wisdom was quickly revised. […]
Bibliotheca turned out even better than I expected. And Adam’s interest in typography proved to be much more than a hipster affection (as more than one cultural commentator had opined): the level of care taken in every aspect of the page design and typesetting was breathtaking to observe.
For example, the first thing I saw when I opened the first volume at random was an example of hanging punctuation, a quotation mark sitting just outside the edge of the column so as not to disturb the visual flow. It’s a gorgeous detail. […] To understand the spirit of Bibliotheca’s design, you have to recognize first and foremost the kind of reader-friendly book it is. This is not a mass market paperback. Not a thriller off the bestseller list. Bibliotheca is designed like an art book. (Not surprisingly, it is also printed by a firm in Germany that prints art books.) Where one kind of design strives for populist accessibility, another aims for the kind of minimalist purity that exalts its content — or rather, signals that its content is meant to be exalted. The designer doesn’t presume to make it beautiful; rather, the designer recognizes its inherent beauty and designs accordingly. That’s what Bibliotheca does.
But of course what primarily interested me was the translation:
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