If you have $15 to $30 million bucks hanging around, you might be interested in an auction to be held at Sotheby’s on Tuesday. What will your money buy: the first English-language book printed in the New World. Seventeen thousand copies of the book were originally published; today only 11 copies survive. The title of this unique book is “The Whole Book of Psalmes” also known as “Bay Psalm Book.” Within its pages you will find 150 psalms in verse.
New England Puritans believed that the King James translation of the Bible was corrupt. They retranslated the psalms from Hebrew into English. Since they wanted the psalms to be sung, they set them to meter.
Like Benjamin Franklin, who established the first lending library in 1731, Thomas Prince of Boston also founded a library. He began collecting more than 2,000 books that he kept in a room in the church steeple of the Old South Meeting House. Prince, a minister, had in his collection five of the psalm books. In 1866, the Prince collection was given to the Boston Public Library for safekeeping. Somehow one of the psalm books ended up in the hands of the mayor of Boston. When his heirs announced that they were going to sell it at auction, the sale was contested by the Old South Church. Eventually the Massachusetts Supreme Court decided that the mayor’s heirs were the rightful owners. The book sold for a whopping $1,025. A real bargain compared to what Sotheby’s expects it will sell for on Tuesday.