History of the Bible. Boston: Printed by Nathaniel Willis, 1815.
SFTS Rare: BS539 .H577 1815
[254 p. - 2 ¼ (56 mm)]
Thumb Bible
The name for these tiny Bibles are believed to have derived from the popularity of Tom Thumb, an English character no bigger than his father's thumb. These were first published in England in the early 17th century. Initially for adults, by the 19th century they were primarily for children. With improved printing and thinner paper in the late 1900s, entire Bibles were printed instead. (Dorina Miller Parmenter, "Small Things of Greatest Consequence: Miniature Bibles in America," Miniature Books: The Format and Function of Tiny Religious Texts, 2019, 55-71.)
According to American Antiquarian Society:
"Early American miniature books mirror their larger contemporaries: the texts are moral, the bindings plain. The majority of the volumes in the American Antiquarian Society's collection contain works of a religious nature. Of the 156 American editions of thumb Bibles cited by Ruth Elizabeth Adomeit in her Three Centuries of Thumb Bibles: A Checklist(New York and London, 1980), the Society holds approximately one hundred examples, dating from 1765. The early examples of these abridgements of the Bible for children are in verse and, like the New England Primer, many of the same verses were included year after year. Similarly, the patriotic gesture was made in 1798 when Lower and Jones of Philadelphia dedicated their version 'to his excellency G. Washington, President of the United States of America.'" (from https://www.americanantiquarian.org/miniature-books)
For a complete digitized version of the George Washington Thumb Bible, which is in the National Library of Israel, go here:
https://rosetta.nli.org.il/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE56617803&change_lng=
