A Bible Story: A Geneva in the Family

My family Bible was printed in 1599. That date makes it almost certainly the oldest man-made object in the district of Melbourne where I live, apart, I suppose, from the chance Aboriginal spearhead or nulla nulla lurking beneath our streets, and older even than some of those. Queen Elizabeth I had but four years of her forty-five-year reign ahead of her when my Bible emerged from the printer, and it would be another five years after its printing before her successor King James I convened the Hampton Court Conference, which in 1611 completed the revised translation of the Bible into English known as the King James or Authorised Version. An anonymous annotation on a flyleaf—the annotations are the sole claim of this volume to uniqueness—observes that my Bible was 204 years old in 1803, the year the United Kingdom declared war on Napoleonic France. That was also the year of the first public railway, in Surrey, the invention of the reaping machine that made harvesting mechanical…