BEAUTIFUL EXTRA-ILLUSTRATED 17TH-CENTURY KING JAMES BIBLE IN ELABORATELY GILT CONTEMPORARY RESTORATION BINDING

BIBLE. The Holy Bible, Containing the Old Testament and the New. London: John Bill and Christopher Barker, 1671, 1669. Octavo, contemporary full black calf, raised bands, spine and boards elaborately gilt-decorated with gold and burgundy onlays, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. Housed in a custom clamshell box. $13,000.

Beautiful 1669-71 King James Bible bound with a Book of Common Prayer, with engraved title pages and 185 woodcut engraved plates, including frontispiece portrait of Charles II and four historical plates in the Book of Common Prayer, in a striking elaborately gilt contemporary calf binding.

First published in 1611, the King James Bible is "the only literary masterpiece ever to be produced by a committee"; Macaulay praised it as "a book, which if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power" (PMM 114). With an additional title page, History of ye Old and New Testament in Cutts, also from 1671, indicating the source of many of the additional illustrations. Each illustrated scene, event or personage is identified by chapter and verse and the plates are bound appropriately throughout. With Apocrypha. Bound with a 1669 edition of Sternhold and Hopkins metrical psalter at rear. Darlow & Moule 554. Herbert 705. Early owner inscriptions.

Interior fairly clean with only a bit of faint marginal dampstaining to last few leaves of metrical psalter; inner hinges expertly repaired; light expert restoration to extremities of beautiful contemporary binding.