‘Most Beautiful Bible’ For Sale Only In Kansas Three-Volume First Edition Can Be Yours For $3,500

Radical but beautiful, one of the limited first editions of the Washburn Bible sits on display here in the Bradbury Thompson Alumni Center of Washburn University.

The Bible was designed by Thompson, considered one of the greatest graphic artists ever. It looks very different from other Bibles because its lines are set like poetry - flush on the left side, ragged on the right.

“It’s the most beautiful Bible in the world,” said Ruth Fink of Topeka, chairwoman of the committee that published it. “I think it’s the best Bible in the art world today.”

Ten years in the making, the Bible won accolades when it first was published in 1979 in a limited three-volume edition. It continued to receive notice when Oxford University Press published it in 1980 and it was made a Book of the Month Club selection.

There are editions at the Vatican, the British Library, the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany, and at the Kremlin Museum in Moscow, Russia, among other places. Now, however, it is sold only at the Washburn University bookstore.

“I’m disappointed it didn’t take off and become the standard,” said Alfred Eisenman, retired director of graphic design studies at Yale University, where Thompson taught.

“I think it is significant because it is so readable,” Eisenman said in a telephone interview from his home in Greenwich, Conn.

Thompson, a 1934 Washburn graduate and one-time captain of its track team, was considered by some the dean of American graphic arts when he died in 1995.

For his Bible, Thompson took the King James Version and eliminated the imposing columns of solid, even lines of type. Instead, the lengths of the lines vary. Words that belong together are kept together as part of a phrase.

Such a phrased version, with comfortable type, means a bigger book. The Oxford edition is 8-by-11 inches, with 1,769 pages and 66 illustrations.

“In my view, it was the greatest masterpiece of book typography of the century,” Eisenman said. “I’ve used this Bible for a long time, ever since it came out. I just wish it weren’t so big.”

Thompson was planning to bring the volume out through a Chicago publisher when the 1973-74 recession came along. The publisher decided not to pursue the project.

So Thompson returned to his alma mater in Topeka to see if it could help. Washburn University’s endowment money could not be used for a risky venture. But Topekans were interested enough to form the Washburn Bible Committee to raise money for the project.

Mrs. Fink’s mother, Olive White Garvey, became the project’s principal benefactor.

In 1979 a limited three-volume edition was published. Three hundred ninety-eight copies were made in Italy, and 375 were put up for sale at $2,500 a set. Nineteen of those are left, Mrs. Fink said, and they now sell for $3,500 each.

In 1980 Oxford University Press printed 50,000 copies of the one-volume edition. About 47,000 have been sold at $75 each.