Up next · Episode Three
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Episode Two of Three
9:33English captionsThe Revolution
In September 2007, Bible Design Blog goes live. The readers come, then the publishers: single-column text, sewn bindings, reader's editions without chapter or verse. It ends with a magazine cover, a new society at the Museum of the Bible, and a call to the pulpit.
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Cold open
J. Mark BertrandYou would even see, even in nice editions, where the type was broken, because they'd been using those plates so long.
...and certainly you wouldn't mess with the design, because people expected the Bible to look the way that it looked, like a reference book. And so what's happened, I think, is it's become easier for us to make the book look like a book meant to be read, and not just, you know, looking things up in it.
NarratorThis is the story of how that changed.
And of a man outside the industry, who helped change it.
Act One: Marginal Interest
NarratorOn the 21st of September, 2007, a novelist and typographer gathered his writing on Bibles into a website of its own.
His subject was one almost nobody wrote about. Not what the Bible says. But how it is made.
J. Mark BertrandI'm also the writer behind Bible Design Blog, which is a blog dedicated to, I always say, the physical form of the Good Book.
NarratorHis conviction fitted in a single sentence.
A Bible that looks like a dictionary or a phone book, he warned, is going to end up being used that way.
J. Mark BertrandWe tend to be unconscious of the way that the design influences the way that we interact with the content.
Could you take the same translation and, by making the design reflect the kind of books we're accustomed to reading, would that make an impact on readability? And in my, again, anecdotal, not scientific, but limited experience, the answer to that question is yes.
It's not an accident: all of the books that you're accustomed to reading deeply look a certain way. That is by design.
NarratorSo he wrote about everything a reader's hands would notice.
He could be hard to please.
Old Mark, he confessed, believed every Bible should be printed on luscious, entirely opaque paper, with sewn signatures and a quality leather binding.
New Mark is pretty happy if just one of those things is achieved. Two sends him over the moon.
The readers came. In one week of reviews, his traffic doubled. Before long his words were quoted in the Cambridge Bible catalogue. Mildly euphoric surreal, he called it.
And others picked up the torch.
Randy BrownOh, absolutely. He was kind of the catalyst, because I was going through his reviews. I'm a writer, he's a writer; he's a far better writer than me.
J. Mark BertrandAnd so, if the goal is to have people read their Bibles, then everything we can do design-wise to make them more readable is beneficial.
Act Two: Publishers Listen
NarratorPublishers were reading, too.
Single-column editions began to appear. Cambridge's Clarion, in 2011. A single-column Legacy from Crossway, in 2012.
Then, in January 2014, Crossway showed him something new.
No verse numbers. No cross references. No notes. Only the text, set in a single column, like any other book.
J. Mark Bertrand...wants to be a reader's Bible, the kind of Bible that you can immerse yourself into and read deeply.
Interlude: the craft
NarratorThat summer, a young designer asked the internet to fund a Bible in four volumes, without chapter or verse numbers.
More than 10,000 people said yes. The campaign passed one million dollars.
The reader's Bible was no longer a fringe idea.
J. Mark BertrandWhen I started writing about this stuff, it was very difficult to convince people that they didn't need their physical Bible to have all the extra apparatus.
Even since 2007, I've seen a huge shift in the attitude of just ordinary people in terms of what features their Bible needs to have.
Bible yoga
NarratorReaders began folding their new Bibles in half, simply to prove they could. They called it Bible yoga.
A newspaper advertisement from 1917, it turned out, had got there first.
In 2016 came a reader's edition in six volumes, in a walnut case.
J. Mark BertrandCirca 2008, if a single-column edition came out and it didn't get every detail right, you just wanted to weep bitter tears, because the thought was, you know, this is going to fail and there will never be another.
We're spoiled for choice now.
Act Three: Recognition
NarratorWhen one interview billed him as the most influential person in Bible publishing, he objected. An industry insider offered a correction. The most interesting person in Bible production. That, he said, he could live with.
Mark WardI tend to think that he hasn't been posting as much on his blog, in part because of his own success. The kinds of things that he was trying to promote are now, thankfully, common.
...a lot of that is due to the cheerleading work and to the thoughtful promotion of J. Mark Bertrand.
NarratorIn 2021, Bible Study magazine devoted an issue to a revolution in Bible design. Mark was on the cover.
He found it on a newsstand, on a road trip with his wife, Laurie. When he sent the photograph home, an uncle congratulated him on the cover of Bible Stud magazine. The Y was hidden behind another magazine.
Mark WardI've long admired J. Mark Bertrand. His Bible Design Blog is so classy; the photography was good. I envied him, because publishers were sending him these beautiful Bibles that I wanted them to send to me.
J. Mark Bertrand and his work popularizing the idea that Bibles actually should be beautiful: he's one of the reasons that I was able to ask for these beautiful Bibles. I'm grateful for his insight.
NarratorIn August 2022, at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, a new Society of Bible Craftsmanship was launched, to celebrate the best-made Bibles in the world. Mark chairs its Award Committee.
Tim WildsmithMark was really at the forefront, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, of writing about Bible design, Bible craftsmanship. And if you talk to anybody in the Bible publishing world, they'll tell you that Mark significantly influenced the world of Bible publishing.
He was very gracious about that. He actually said, you know, "I have a bigger problem with the fact that you have a beard and tortoiseshell glasses."
NarratorWe are living, he said, in a golden age of Bible publishing.
Tag: the call
NarratorOne dream remains. No publisher has yet handed him the keys.
J. Mark BertrandI'm still waiting for that, like, "We want to see what you would do if these barriers were removed." We've come close, but it just hasn't quite happened yet.
NarratorBy then, the reviewer had become something else. In 2015, he was called to a pulpit.
J. Mark BertrandAt my church, every time a person joins our church, we give them a reader's Bible, as one of the things...
...a shift in the way that we read. So we read the Bible more like we would read a book.
Sources & credits
Footage courtesy of
- Ward on Words (Mark Ward), “Why Do Bibles Today Look So Good?”
- A Nickels Worth Bible Reviews (Randy Brown)
- Tim Wildsmith
- evangelicalBible, “Mark Bertrand: The Schuyler Treveris”
- Grace Presbyterian Church, Sioux Falls
Pictures
- Photographs by J. Mark Bertrand, Bible Design Blog / Lectio
- Quotation courtesy of 2K/DENMARK
Research
- Facts from the Bible Design Blog archive, lectio.org/about and the Museum of the Bible newsroom.
Production
- Narration: A synthetic British voice
- Music: Original score
- Type: EB Garamond
