The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments: Together with the Apocrypha: Translated out of the Original Tongues.

Item Number: 142810

Charlestown, Massachusetts: Printed by and for Samuel Etheridge, 1803.

First edition of this King James Family Bible printed by Samuel Etheridge of Charlestown, Massachusetts. Quarto, bound in full period paneled calf, rebacked with a morocco spine label lettered in gilt, illustrated with 8 full-page engravings and folding map of the Holy Land. From the library of Nathaniel and Anna Loomis with their genealogical notes in the family record at rear. In very good condition.

Bible printing in America was limited in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, with most Bibles being supplied by British and European printers. With advances in printing techniques and machinery, combined with demand, by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Bible became the “most printed, most distributed, and most read written text in North America" (Gutjahr, An American Bible, 185).