Bay Psalm Book
The Bay Psalm Book is a metrical Psalter first printed in 1640 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was the first book printed in British North America. The Psalms in it are metrical translations into English. The translations are not particularly polished, and none has remained in use, although some of the tunes to which they were sung have survived. However, its production, just 20 years after the Pilgrims' arrival at Plymouth, Massachusetts, represents a considerable achievement. It went through several editions and remained in use for well over a century.
In November 2013, one of eleven known surviving copies of the first edition sold at auction for $14.2 million, a record for a printed book.
History
17th century
The early residents of the Massachusetts Bay Colony brought with them several books of psalms: the Ainsworth Psalter, compiled by Henry Ainsworth for use by Puritan "separatists" in Holland; the Ravenscroft Psalter ; and the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter, of which there were several editions. Evidently they were dissatisfied with the translations from Hebrew in these several psalters and wished for some that were closer to the original. They hired "thirty pious and learned Ministers", including Richard Mather, Thomas Mayhew, and John Eliot, to undertake a new translation, which they presented here. The tunes to be sung to the new translations were the familiar ones from their existing psalters.The first printing was the third product of the Stephen Day press, and consisted of a 148 small quarto leaves, including a 12-page preface, "The Psalmes in Metre", "An Admonition to the Reader", and an extensive list of errata headed "Faults escaped in printing". As with subsequent editions of the book, Day printed the book for sale by the first bookseller in British America, Hezekiah Usher, whose shop at that time was also located in Cambridge. An estimated 1,700 copies of the first edition were printed.
The third edition was extensively revised by Henry Dunster and Richard Lyon. The revision was entitled The Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs of the Old and New Testament, faithfully translated into English metre. This revision was the basis for all subsequent editions, and was popularly known as the New England Psalter or New England Version. The ninth edition, the first to contain music, included 13 tunes from John Playford's A Breefe Introduction to the Skill of Musick.
18th century
The expansion of the neoclassical movement in England led to an evolution in the singing of psalms. These changes found their way to America and subsequently new psalm versions were written. In the early part of the 18th century several updated psalms, notably those written by Tate and Brady and by Isaac Watts, were published. Shortly thereafter several congregations in New England elected to replace the Bay Psalm Book with these new titles.In 1718, Cotton Mather undertook the revision of the original Bay Psalm Book which he had studied since youth. Two subsequent revisions were published in 1752, by John Barnard of Marblehead and in 1758 by Thomas Prince. Prince was a clergyman at the Old South Church in Boston. He convinced the members of the congregation of the need to produce a revised, more scholarly, edition of the Bay Psalm Book. Unfortunately, Prince’s version was not accepted outside of his membership and in 1789, the Old South Church reverted to the earlier edition published by Isaac Watts.
Title page
The title page of the first edition of 1640 reads:Faithfully
TRANSLATED into ENGLISH
Metre.
Whereunto is prefixed a discourse
declaring not only the lawfullness, but also
the necessity of the heavenly Ordinance
of singing Scripture Psalmes in
the Churches of God.
Imprinted, 1640
Extant copies
Eleven copies of the first edition of the Bay Psalm Book are still known to exist, of which only five copies are complete. Only one of the eleven copies is currently held outside the United States. One copy is owned by each of the following:| Owner/Library | Image | Notes |
| Library of Congress | ||
| Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University | This copy was owned by Old South Church in Boston between 1750 and 1850, before passing through a number of hands, finally being bought by Cornelius Vanderbilt II in 1879. It was eventually inherited by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and owned by her until her death in 1942. It was bought for Yale University in 1947 by a group of alumni and friends. | |
| Houghton Library, Harvard University | Thought to have been acquired in the effort to replace Harvard's library, after its destruction by fire in 1764. It was previously owned by Middlecott Cooke, a member of the Harvard class of 1723. It carries the signature of John Leverett, suggesting it may have belonged to John Leverett, the 19th governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The copy is incomplete, missing 10 leaves. | |
| John Carter Brown Library, Brown University | Originally the property of Richard Mather, one the original translators, it passed into the ownership of Thomas Prince |