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Monday, September 26, 2011

Bible Printer's Errors: The Vinegar Bible

John Baskett (d. 1742) was the printer for King George III of England and fot the University of Oxford from 1711 - 1742 and produced ornate leather-bound and gold-trimmed editions.  He is best remembered, however, for one of his magnificent failures, what is known as the Vinegar Bible (1717).

The Vinegar Bible is full of typographical errors but the most glaring problem occurs in the page heading for the twentieth chapter of the book of Luke at the passage containing The Parable of the Vineyard (Luke 20:9), which instead is printed as The Parable of the Vinegar.

In a wordplay on the printer's name, the book was derisively labelled a "Baskett-ful of errors."

http://www.stenodoc.org.uk/st_minver/index.org
St. Minver Church, named for St. Menefreda, at St. Minver in Cornwall, has three copies of the Vinegar Bible.  The church is on the site of a wooden church from late Saxon times.





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