Religion: The RSV in New Editions

For ten years, Thomas Nelson & Sons has held exclusive publishing rights to the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. This privilege is roughly like having the right to print greenbacks, for lately the RSV has been selling a million copies a year. Last week the Nelson monopoly ran out, and five more publishers jumped into the RSV field after being blessed in a special service at Manhattan’s Riverside Church.

Water Buffalo Hide. The Revised Standard Version was not considered a likely source of profit in 1936 when Nelson decided to help the National Council of Churches finance the revision in return for a ten-year exclusive license on its sale. Many churchmen and publishers thought the RSV could never make a dent in King James Version sales, but it now accounts for a fifth of the U.S. market. When scholars finally finished the RSV in 1952, Nelson spent $3,000,000 on preparation and plates, sank a phenomenal $500,000 in promotion the first year of publishing, followed by $400,000 the second year, and $300,000 every year thereafter. It paid off. Originally published in two editions, selling at $6 and $10, Nelson eventually produced 122 editions with a variety of bindings, including a pulpit edition (price: $70 to $120) that sold 25,000 copies. One year the company bought the entire North American catch of sealskin for bindings, had to turn to water buffalo hide from India when that ran out.

Four years ago, the National Council of Churches, which still owns the RSV’s copyright and last year collected $190,000 in royalties on its sales, began looking around for additional publishers. Of the five new firms, only Philadelphia’s A. J. Holman Co. will battle Nelson in the field of expensive pulpit Bibles. The other companies all claim to have some feature all to themselves.

Watermarked Sealskin. The Oxford Annotated Bible: Revised Standard Version ($7.95 and $12.50) is, says Oxford University Press, “expected to fill an existing need for an edition of the RSV that will provide authoritative explanations of many points in the text.” William Collins Sons & Co. is advertising the Collins Clear-Type Plantin Text RSV Bible, which features “four pages of full-color illustrated helps, a Biblical time chart in color, an entirely new collection of modern full-color photographs, and an eight-page, full-color selection of maps”—all for only $8.50 in the edition with “French Morocco Black Leather semi-overlapping covers, red under gold edges, ribbon marker, boxed.” Harper & Row has a children’s Bible with 44 pages of new Children’s Helps, “the first set of helps that children can use fully and understand easily.” Harper also claims its “black watermarked sealskin is the only such binding announced by any RSV publisher.” Cleveland’s The World Publishing Co. will turn out the RSV in 32 editions.

All this energy by its rivals causes no alarm at Thomas Nelson. Its management believes that the basic demand for the Bible, helped by the thousands spent in promotion by the five new publishers, will increase the market enough so that Nelson will sell even more RSV Bibles than it did as a monopoly.