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2. "Gods Altar Needs Not Our Pollishings": Revisiting th~ Bay Psalm Book Like the "The Trout and the Milk," this essay on the Bay Psalm Book is animated by Amory's unhappiness with some of the implications of the New Bibliography. Aiming his fire at the notion of an ideal or "iconic" text, he used the variations among six surviving first editions of the Bay Psalm Book to demonstrate that changes were constantly being introduced during (and because of) the process of printing and assembling sheets into bound books. The details of this painstaking collation appear in three appendices, all of them stemming from Amory's efforts to identify the fonts being used by the Cambridge press, a matter that is visually demonstrated in Figure 7. Running titles are indicated in Figure 8, here transposed from the appendix in which it originally appeared. That the technology of the hand press lent itself to such consequences was old news,1 but Amory was the first to demonstrate so carefully its consequences for the Bay Psalm Book. Moreover, he detected signs of intentional rewriting that occurred as the book was being printed. Ten years later, in 1650/51, Henry Dunster redid much of the translation and it was his version, together with further variants, that was subsequently reprinted. Not until the middle of the nineteenth century, and in the context of the emergence of a group of rare book collectors-George Brinley , Edward Crowninshield, and others-was the first edition of 1640 suddenly thrust into the status of "the lcon."2 souRcE: Printing History 12 (1990): 2-14, which has granted permission to republish the essay. The "Bay Psalm Book" can mean three very different things: a book, surviving in eleven of the original run of 1,700 copies printed at the Cambridge press; a nineteenth-century institution, enforced through facsimiles of the first edition, whose contents scarcely matter; and a text, revised in 1651 and reprinted down to the late eighteenth century. These are the proper subjects of physical bibliography, critical theory, and textual criticism, respectively. I shall revisit all ofthese, starting in physical bibliography, with the type. How many fonts did the Cambridge press have? Where did they come from? When and how were they first employed? There have not been many studies of the Bay Psalm Book of late, except by musicologists. I return to issues that have been neglected for over thirty years. Their neglect is an unconscious tribute to three works of scholarship : George Parker Winship's 1945 Rosenbach lectures; Lawrence Starkey 's Ph.D. thesis, written under the direction of Fredson Bowers in 1949; and Zoltan Haraszti's 1956 facsimile edition and commentary. Of these, Starkey, the first to apply the methods of Greg and McKerrow to American printing, concentrates on physical bibliography, that is, the book; Haraszti "Gods Altar Needs Not Our Pollishings" 35 is the first and nearly the last scholar to study the text; and Winship anticipates the current vogue for book trade history.3 Winship's vision of New England culture seems somewhat blinkered today, even by comparison to the earlier work ofSamuel Eliot Morison, yet his collection ofprimary materials was nearly exhaustive and, despite inaccuracies oftranscription, remains indispensable. The chief characters in my tale are the Cambridge press's proprietor, Elizabeth Glover, relict ofthe wealthy minister Jose Glover, who assembled the printing shop but died on the voyage from England; Henry Dunster, her second husband and president ofHarvard College until 1654-, when he resigned on charges of antipaedobaptism; and three printers, Stephen Day,4 indentured servant of the Glovers, his son Matthew, and their successor Samuel Green, from whose loins sprang most ofthe early colonial printers. The press was originally located in the Dunster house (now the site of the Cambridge Savings Bank in Harvard Square), but in 1659 it was moved to the Indian College, a brick building erected on the adjacent corner ofHarvard Yard and torn down in 1692. Thanks to a lawsuit between President Dunster and the Glover heirs, we can account for every sheet of paper the Glovers brought over and can work out the press runs for most of the productions of the press from its arrival in 1638 down to 1654-, the date of the lawsuit. I have divided my material into three sections, which I will call the Type, the Icon, and the "Text:' the quotation marks around the last to be presently explained. 1. The Type In a recent excavation at the site...

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