The Aitken Bible (1782)

A single-volume printing of the King James Old and New Testaments, set and printed by Robert Aitken in Philadelphia in 1782. It is not a new translation. Aitken reprinted the familiar English text his customers already knew; what was new was that, for the first time, a complete English-language Bible had been set in type, printed and bound on American soil, by an American printer, under the recommendation of the American Congress rather than the Crown printer's patent that had controlled Bible printing in the English-speaking world for two centuries.

The edition was pocket-sized, of the kind carried in a coat or a knapsack rather than left on a lectern. That size is part of the object's history: small format books get used hard, get lost, get passed down and get thrown away in a way that pulpit folios do not, and it is one reason so few copies of an edition of ten thousand survive today.

Robert Aitken was born in Dalkeith, Scotland, in 1734 and emigrated to Philadelphia in 1769, where he set up first as a bookseller and then as a printer. He had already put his shop's reputation on the map before the Bible project: in 1775 he launched The Pennsylvania Magazine and hired a recent English immigrant named Thomas Paine as its editor, giving the magazine a circulation greater than any American periodical before it.

The Bible grew directly out of the war. Imported English Bibles, which colonial law and British trade policy had always required Americans to buy from London rather than print themselves, stopped arriving once the Revolution cut off that trade. Aitken had already tested the ground: between 1777 and 1781 his shop printed the first English-language New Testaments produced in the colonies, a smaller and less commercially risky project than a complete Bible. The full Old and New Testament was the next, larger step, undertaken, in his own account, at his own financial risk.

On 21 January 1781 Aitken petitioned Congress, seeking official government sanction for the Bible he intended to print at his own expense. Congress referred the manuscript to its chaplains, the Reverend William White and the Reverend George Duffield, for examination. Their report was favourable, and on 12 September 1782 Congress passed a resolution that read, in full: "Resolved, That the United States in Congress assembled, highly approve the pious and laudable undertaking of Mr. Aitken, as subservient to the interest of religion as well as the progress of the arts in this country, and being satisfied from the above report, of his care and accuracy in the execution of the work, they recommend this edition of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States, and hereby authorize him to publish this recommendation in the manner he shall think proper."

Read closely, the resolution does three specific things and no more: it approves of Aitken's project in general terms, it recommends his particular edition to the public on the strength of the chaplains' accuracy check, and it authorizes Aitken to print the resolution itself as advertising copy. As the historian Katherine Carte has put it, discussing this exact resolution, Congress's approval of a print run was a far different thing from the kind of institutional backing the British Crown gave its own authorized Bible: Congress did not claim any copyright or printing monopoly over the text, the way the British crown did through its King's Printer patent, and it did not treat the edition as an act of state religious policy.

Congress's resolution was a commendation, not a contract. It came with no money. Congress did not purchase copies, subsidize the print run, or agree to any of the government-backed arrangements Aitken had hoped for when he petitioned in 1781, which by some accounts included a wish for something like the exclusive printing patent that the King's Printer, Robert Barker, had long held in England. When Aitken went back to Congress in 1789 and asked outright for a fourteen-year exclusive patent to print Bibles in the United States, the request was refused; by then several other American printers were already producing Testaments and Bibles of their own, and no such national monopoly was ever granted to any printer of the English Bible in America.

The distinction matters because it is the one most often collapsed in later retellings: Congress commended one printer's edition as accurate and worth buying. It did not create, endorse or fund an official national Bible, and it explicitly declined, both in 1782 and again in 1789, to give Aitken any of the state backing that would have made his Bible something closer to Britain's Authorized Version.

The examination Congress relied on was carried out by two working clergymen already serving as congressional chaplains: William White, later the first American Episcopal bishop of Pennsylvania, and George Duffield, a Presbyterian minister. Their report to Congress stated that, having selected and examined passages throughout the work, they judged it executed with great accuracy, with as few grammatical and typographical errors as could be expected in an undertaking of that magnitude.

That last qualification was honest rather than merely diplomatic. Later readers have identified a handful of surviving misprints in copies of the edition, among them "not" printed for "now" at 2 Kings 7:12, a chapter of Hosea mislabeled in its running head, and "thy" printed for "the" at 1 Timothy 4:6. Errors of that kind are ordinary in eighteenth-century hand-set type run off under wartime pressure on limited paper stock; they do not appear to have affected the chaplains' overall judgment of the edition's accuracy, and Aitken's shop is not recorded as having withdrawn or corrected the sheets once printed.

Aitken's own account of the edition's cost survives in a petition in which he set out his losses in Continental currency and the print run together: he wrote that he calculated his true loss by Continental money at three thousand pounds, and, on the edition of ten thousand Bibles, a further four thousand, adding that from these figures his correspondent could readily judge his situation. Wartime paper and labour, bought and paid in a currency that was depreciating as he worked, had already made the edition expensive before a single copy reached a customer.

The timing then turned against him completely. The Revolutionary War ended in 1783, trade with Britain reopened, and British publishers immediately resumed exporting Bibles to the United States, printed on better paper, in larger and more familiar formats, and without the wartime cost premium Aitken had absorbed. The American market that had justified a domestic edition simply stopped needing one. Aitken reported his losses directly to President Washington in 1790; Washington's secretary, Tobias Lear, replied on the President's behalf expressing sympathy for the losses Aitken had sustained through the depreciation of public securities and, in Lear's words, the large impression of the Bible which you made in the war. By the Museum of the Bible's account of the episode, Aitken's Bible venture ultimately left him tens of thousands of dollars in debt, a debt from which his printing business never fully recovered. A wartime anecdote associated with the project holds that Aitken had to bury his set type in a barn to keep it from British troops occupying Philadelphia; the story is repeated in modern institutional retellings of his career rather than documented in a contemporary record located for this entry.

Aitken printed roughly ten thousand copies, the figure he himself used in his own petition on his losses. What survives today is a small fraction of that run, though institutions differ on exactly how small. The American Bible Society's own Faith and Liberty Discovery Center, when it displayed this copy, described it as one of about forty known copies of the edition. The Bishop Payne Library at Virginia Theological Seminary, describing the two copies in its own collection, states that of Aitken's estimated ten thousand, fifty survive. Other, less formal accounts put the number lower still, at under thirty. No single current scholarly census reconciling these figures was located in the course of this research; what can be said with confidence is that the surviving population is measured in the tens, not the hundreds, and that every surviving copy is individually significant to the history of American printing and of American religious life.

Beyond its printing in Philadelphia in 1782, this exact copy's early custodial history is undocumented in the sources consulted for this record. No source located states when or how it entered the American Bible Society's holdings, and the Society, founded in New York in 1816 and relocated to Philadelphia in 2015, does not appear to publish an online accession record for it. That gap should be stated plainly rather than bridged with a plausible-sounding guess: for the great majority of the roughly forty to fifty surviving Aitken Bibles, the two centuries between 1782 and their appearance in a named twentieth or twenty-first century collection are simply unrecorded, and this copy is no exception.

What is documented is its recent public life. The American Bible Society opened the Faith and Liberty Discovery Center, a forty-thousand-square-foot museum built at a reported cost of sixty million dollars, on Independence Mall in Philadelphia in 2021. This copy of the Aitken Bible was on exhibit there, and it was in that gallery, in July 2023, that a Wikimedia Commons contributor working under the name Kreuz und quer photographed both the bound volume and its title page, releasing both photographs into the public domain under a CC0 dedication. Those two photographs, taken a day apart on 4 and 5 July 2023, are the confirmed images anchoring this record. The Society closed the Discovery Center on 28 March 2024, citing structural limitations at the leased site and the venue's financial sustainability after the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic years. No source located states what became of the museum's collection after the closure, including this Bible; the Society's own public statements at the time spoke only of an intention to make its content available in a future digitized form, without addressing the physical objects. Absent any report of a sale, loan return or transfer, continued Society ownership is the reasonable inference, but this record does not claim to know the object's present physical location with any more precision than that.

The Aitken Bible's meaning at the time it was made is documented, and it is a narrower meaning than the object is sometimes given credit, or blame, for. Aitken was himself a Presbyterian, buried after his death at Market Square Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, and the two chaplains Congress assigned to examine his manuscript, an Episcopal clergyman and a Presbyterian one, reflect the same religiously plural environment in which the edition was produced and endorsed. Nothing in the 1782 resolution, and nothing in Aitken's own petitions, proposes establishing any single church or doctrine; the resolution's own language ties its approval to the interest of religion in general and the progress of the arts, meaning the printing trade, in the new country, not to any confessional position. Other accounts of the period record that a group of Philadelphia clergy, including Presbyterian ministers Francis Alison and John Ewing and the Reverend William Marshall of the city's Scots Presbyterian Church, separately petitioned Congress in support of ensuring the colonies' supply of Scripture, underscoring that concern for Bible supply during the war crossed denominational lines rather than serving one church's institutional interest.

The clearest documented purpose behind the edition is a practical and civic one: a wartime print run intended, in Aitken's own promotional use of the congressional endorsement, to supply Bibles for the country's inhabitants and, as earlier related New Testament printings of his shop were explicitly marketed, for use in schools. That is a real and stated function, tied to literacy and religious instruction rather than to any esoteric or hidden programme; this record has found no evidence of one, and states that absence as a finding rather than searching further for a mystery that is not there.

Aitken never recovered his losses on the Bible. His later petitions to Congress, seeking first an exclusive fourteen-year Bible-printing patent in 1789 and then an appointment as a government printer in 1791, were refused and tabled respectively. He died in Philadelphia on 15 July 1802, leaving his printing and bookbinding business, and its debts, to his eldest child, Jane Aitken. Jane took over the shop on Third Street and ran it as a printer, bookbinder and bookseller in her own right, producing at least sixty publications over the following decade; the printing historian Isaiah Thomas credited her work with firmly establishing the Aitken name's reputation for excellence, and she is recorded as the only woman binder of comparable skill known from that period in Philadelphia. In 1808 she printed a four-volume English translation of the Septuagint and New Testament prepared by Charles Thomson, the former secretary of the Continental Congress, the first English Bible printed by a woman in the United States. Like her father's edition a generation earlier, Thomson's Bible was a critical success and a commercial failure. The pattern repeats across two generations of the same Philadelphia printing family: an ambitious, accurate, distinctly American edition of Scripture, undertaken at real financial risk, that the market of its own day would not support.

Three separate gaps sit inside this record rather than being smoothed over. First, this specific copy's custodial history before its appearance at the Faith and Liberty Discovery Center is not documented in any source located. Second, the American Bible Society has not published, so far as this research could establish, any inventory or accession number for the object, nor any statement of where within its operations the object is now kept following the Discovery Center's 2024 closure. Third, the scholarly count of how many 1782 Aitken Bibles survive at all is not settled: the Discovery Center's own descriptive material for this copy said about forty, a specialist seminary library holding two other copies says fifty, and some general accounts say fewer than thirty. None of these gaps is filled with a guess in this record; each is recorded as what it is, an open question about an object whose eighteenth-century origin is, by contrast, unusually well documented.