The Wôpanâak Bible: A Census 

I am currently conducting a census of John Eliot’s Algonquian translation of the Bible, published in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1661, 1663, and 1685. My project builds upon the 1880s census completed by Wilberforce Eames and published in James Pilling’s Bibliography of the Algonquian Languages (Washington: G.P.O., 1891). Of the three editions, Eames work records a combined total of one hundred copies.  To date, The Wôpanâak Bible: A Census has extended the number of recorded copies for each of the three editions, thus raising the combined total beyond 150 copies.

John Ratcliff & Edmund Ranger: A Reexamination  

The bindings of John Ratcliff (fl. 1661-1682) represent the earliest identifiable bindings from colonial New England. The attribution of specific tools and subsequent styles to the work of Ratcliff derives from two blind-tooled commonplace books of Samuel Sewall (1652-1730). Both have dated (1677) inscriptions that record Ratcliff as the binder. Book History literature suggests that Ratcliff, who came to America with the charge of binding copies of the 1663 Eliot Indian Bible, returned to England around 1682, and that his binding tools then passed into the hands of American binder Edmund Ranger. 

In 1928, Thomas J. Holmes published an examination of bindings, “The Book Bindings of John Ratcliff and Edmund Range,” in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society. The following year, the Proceedings published Holmes’s “Additional Notes on Ratcliff and Ranger Bindings.” The article concluded with an additional survey conducted by William G. Land, “Further Notes on Ratcliff and Ranger Bindings,” highlighting relevant bindings found in the Connecticut Historical Society.

In total, the American Antiquarian Society and Connecticut Historical Society surveys conducted by Holmes and Land identified seventeen bindings believed to be the work of either John Ratcliff or Edmund Ranger. In addition, the publications devoted significant exploration to the question of determining which binder is represented by the “level of quality” of the binding work. The attribution of bindings between Ratcliff or Ranger is problematic. The main assumption, that Ratcliff returned to England in 1680, is speculative and, to date, unsupported by biographical documentation.

This active census extends Holmes and Land’s findings to 42 copies with no attempt made to distinguish between the work of Ratcliff or Ranger. While the data focuses on two named binders and their identifiable tools and bindings, my emphasis is not the craft of binding. The work, rather, is part of a broader exploration into the bookselling trade and the production of books in seventeenth-century Colonial New England.