Major Collection of Early English Bibles to Auction

More than 70 Bibles and devotional works from from the Estate of Robert Funk will go under the hammer at Heritage Auctions’ October 14 Rare Books sale.

Running from the English Reformation through the Restoration, the Funk Collection encompasses the principal textual traditions that shaped the English Bible, among them the translations associated with William Tyndale, Miles Coverdale, John Rogers’ “Matthew’s Bible,” the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible and the King James or Authorized, Version. It also includes the first Bible printed in Scotland, rare and bibliographically complex variants, small-format Bibles intended for private devotion, and highly decorated bindings from the golden age of English bookbinding.

The Funk Collection contains three significant William Tyndale editions, the rarest a 1549 folio printed by John Day and William Seres and bound in gilt-decorated 18th century vellum. Its Book of Revelation contains 20 small woodcuts, each accompanied by a rhyming couplet printed beneath or beside the image. 

A second 1549 folio, published in London by Thomas Raynalde and William Hyll, carries a direct association with the bibliographical study of Tyndale. An inserted leaf bears an inscription by Francis Fry whose 1878 Bibliographical Description of the Editions of the New Testament, Tyndale’s Version in English established a sequence of editions by locating and collating surviving copies. Fry identifies the volume as the second edition.

The third is the first quarto edition of Tyndale’s New Testament, published in London. Printed and revised by Richard Jugge in 1552, with a title page bearing a portrait of Edward VI, it is regarded as the last English New Testament printed in England before Mary I’s accession in July 1553 and the ensuing suppression of Protestant biblical texts.

The collection also includes a rare first edition of Richard Taverner’s Bible, printed in London in 1539 by John Bydell and Thomas Barthlet. Although Taverner’s translation exerted less influence on later English Bibles than Tyndale’s, it introduced or helped establish vocabulary including “parable” and “Passover.” 

Other highlights include: 

• a Great Bible, the first authorized version printed in England and sanctioned for official church use after Henry VIII’s break with Rome, the copy here published in 1549 during Edward VI’s reign with numerous woodcut illustrations
• 16 Geneva Bibles, including a rare copy of the first folio edition printed in England in 1576.
• the 1579 Geneva Bible printed in Edinburgh by Alexander Arbuthnot and Thomas Bassandyne, the first Bible printed in Scotland and often called the Bassandyne Bible
• the first folio edition of the King James, or Authorized, Version printed in Scotland, produced by Robert Young in Edinburgh in 1633 after becoming the king’s printer in Scotland, in association with Charles I’s Scottish coronation that year
• a 1666 Cambridge Bible and a 1681 Oxford Bible bound in the manner associated with the Queen’s Binders, a largely anonymous group of late-17th century craftsmen whose work is linked to aristocratic and royal patrons including Catherine of Braganza and Mary of Modena