As it turned out, the Bibliotheca project, which had a fundraising goal of $37,000, ended up raising $1.4 million! And this is where things began to get tricky. With a much higher demand than he ever imagined, Adam Lewis Greene (the creator of Bibliotheca) decided to really make it a very special publication. He offered people who had signed up for the entire 4-volume Bible to add the Apocrypha and a slipcase for no additional charge; he decided to edit his base text of the ASV more extensively; and he had to do a whole lot more work on setting up the whole process of editing, printing, distribution, etc.
Of course, the more expansive project led to some pretty significant delays, and over the past couple years, you could read all kinds of complaints on Adam's Kickstarter page from people who thought he had dropped the ball by accepting the money and not delivering the finished project according to his original schedule. The rest of us merely waited patiently, and kept following the updates throughout the process, until the exciting news arrived just a few days ago: Bibliotheca was finished and ready to ship. Which leads me to yesterday...when my copy of Bibliotheca finally arrived!
This won't be a complete review by any means, but just some of my first impressions. First of all, when I opened the box, I was excited to see this sheet of cardboard:
I haven't had a chance yet to read much of the text, but so far I do like Adam's adaptation of the ASV. He has replaced much of the archaic language that the ASV retained from the KJV, and he uses the convention of printing YHWH for the Tetragrammaton (the name of God), instead of the ASV's "Jehovah." I will report more on my thoughts concerning the text in future posts. Overall, I am very impressed so far with the production of this Bible, and as far as I'm concerned it was worth the two-year wait. I will be interested to see what other readers think of Bibliotheca. (I'm sure the topic will be addressed by members of the Bible Versions Discussion/Dialogue group on Facebook!)