By Cameron Houston and Melissa Singer
AT 1520 pages, 783,137 words and a retail price of $120, the latest edition of the King James Version of the Bible could be one of the saviours of the Australian bookshop industry.
Too unwieldy to post and too precious to risk losing in the mail, the Bible printed by Oxford University Press to mark the 400th anniversary of the tome, is flying off shelves.
Illustration: Matt Golding
The commemorative edition is entirely faithful to the 1611 original, replete with Jacobean spelling, arcane prose and more than 350 printing errors. The typeface, however, has been changed from Gothic to Times Roman, amid concerns that new readers would be unable to decipher the old font.
The Bibles have proved a surprise hit with Australian book lovers, and are completely sold out, according to the publisher, which is scrambling to print more copies.
King James Version of the Bible.
The Bible buyer for Christian bookstore Koorong, David Renshaw, credits the surge in demand to a recent review by Melbourne literary critic Peter Craven, who claimed the 400-year-old Bible was rivalled only by Shakespeare for its influence on the English language.
Mr Renshaw said sales of religious texts tended to increase around Easter and Christmas. ''It's extremely difficult to anticipate demand and we've been trying to service that as best we can. In some cases, we've been caught short, but we've tried to remedy that by flying more copies in,'' he said.
People were attracted to the commemorative Bible because of its authenticity, he said. ''Several publishers have produced a facsimile version and that's the one that is attracting all the attention from people who might not normally get interested but are looking at it from a literary or cultural perspective.''
Mark Rubbo, managing director of Readings bookstore, conceded that the book's success had caught him and his competitors off-guard.
''Obviously it's a beautiful object and the content has great merit, but I was surprised because the book market is very soft at the moment and $120 is a big ask,'' Mr Rubbo said.
Readings had sold 31 copies and had taken several orders for the next shipment expected in May, he said.
Flinders University theologian Reverend Andrew Dutney said that over four centuries the English used in earlier translations ''has become old fashioned and in some ways impenetrable to modern speakers.
''[But] by being hard to understand to a modern hearer it creates a mystery in the beauty, especially for people who read the Bible for spiritual nourishment.''
Some passages, such as Psalm 23 - ''The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want'' - are preferred by many readers in their earlier forms, Professor Dutney said.
''It's about the meaning, but meaning is always mediated, communicated in some way, in this case through words. It's hard to distinguish the meaning from the words.''
But the tricky, sometimes old language - for example, ''maketh'' instead of ''makes'' - seems to have only helped sales of the latest version of the KJV.