{"id":853,"date":"2026-10-28T23:33:32","date_gmt":"2026-10-28T23:33:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/?p=853"},"modified":"2026-10-28T23:33:32","modified_gmt":"2026-10-28T23:33:32","slug":"the-bay-psalm-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/the-bay-psalm-book\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bay Psalm Book"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the winter of 1639 and 1640, in a wooden house not far from the Charles River at Cambridge in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a printer named Stephen Daye pulled sheets off a wooden screw press and printed the first book ever produced in British North America. It was a psalter: The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre<\/em>, with a preface by the minister John Cotton arguing that singing the psalms in the congregation was not merely lawful but necessary. The press had been shipped from England two years earlier by a merchant called Jesse Glover, and it was owned by his mother-in-law, Elizabeth Glover, who had leased it to Daye to run. The sheet you would have held up to the light from that first printing carries, in its lower half, a small block of Hebrew letters that no printer in the Americas had ever attempted before. The book is known today as the Bay Psalm Book, and the eleven copies of its first edition that still survive are among the most examined objects in the history of American printing. Yet the story of the Bay Psalm Book is not really a story about rarity or price, even though a single copy sold at auction in 2013 for fourteen million dollars. It is a story about what it means to make a book in a place where no one had made one before: about type cut in London and shipped across an ocean, about paper milled on the banks of a river the printer had never seen, about a text that was translated for the first time in the wilderness of the New England settlement, and about the strange afterlife of a volume that was at once a devotional manual, a declaration of religious identity, and an act of technical bravado. Understanding the Bay Psalm Book means understanding a moment when a small group of English separatists decided that the words of the Hebrew psalms deserved a new English wording of their own, and then decided to print them.<\/p>\n

The Press on the Charles<\/h2>\n

The first thing to understand about the Bay Psalm Book is that it was, for a very short time, the only thing its press could do. The Glovers were not in the business of books. Jesse Glover, a merchant of Dorchester, had acquired the press in England and had it shipped to New England in 1638, probably with the intention of printing a new edition of the Bible for the settlers; that intention foundered, in the familiar way of plans to finance printing with land grants, and the press sat idle until Elizabeth Glover found a printer who could make it pay. She found Daye, who had come to New England from England and who had already shown himself willing to work in ways that a better-established pressman might have refused. The result was a press that was, in effect, a single-book enterprise.<\/p>\n

Daye’s third product was the psalter of 1640, the two earlier products being less ambitious. The material he had to work with was, by the standards of a printer’s shop, extraordinary. The Library of Congress, which owns one of the eleven surviving copies and has examined it in detail, describes the composition of the type used in the book with the specificity that printers love: a principal text type of ninety-five point English Roman, with eighty-three point Pica and fifty-three point Brevier available for smaller work, a set of ornaments for the headings, and, remarkably, a Hebrew type, some of whose characters appear to have been cut in wood. The Roman type was of English manufacture; the paper was not, and appears to have been made in the colonies. So the reader of the 1640 psalter encountered a page that was, in its physical materials, a collaboration between two continents: type milled in England, paper made in New England, and ink mixed on the spot in a cold room in Cambridge.<\/p>\n

It is worth pausing on what that Hebrew type means. Printing Hebrew in Europe was itself a specialist undertaking, demanding punches cut by a punchcutter who understood the script and a compositor who could set it right to left. That a Cambridge printing house could do it at all, in 1640, tells us something about the settlement’s resources and about the links between New England and the London book trade. It also plants, deliberately or not, one of the themes that run through this journal: the movement of the written word between communities, and the price of moving it.<\/p>\n

Isaiah Thomas, the Boston printer and publisher who in 1810 wrote the first full history of printing in America, described the type in his own words, and his description is affectionate rather than merely technical: it was “Roman, of the size of small bodied English, entirely new, and may be called a very good letter.” Thomas was speaking of a book he had handled and admired, and his phrase captures something a modern reader of facsimiles can still verify. The type is good. It is even, generous in size, and surprisingly modern in its look, which is one reason the Bay Psalm Book does not read as a provincial curiosity. It reads as a book. That is what makes it remarkable: the first book printed in British North America is not a crude beginning but a confident production, produced with imported equipment by a man working in a settlement with no printing tradition behind him at all.<\/p>\n

The physical facts of the volume are equally assured. It was printed in small quarto, running to a hundred and forty-eight leaves, and it opens with a twelve-page preface by John Cotton prefaced by a title page that declares the book’s purpose: a discourse “declaring not only the lawfullnes, but also the necessity of the heavenly ordinance of singing scripture psalmes in the churches of God.” After the preface come “The Psalmes in Metre,” then “An Admonition to the Reader,” and then one of the most endearing documents in the early history of American printing: a list of errors headed “Faults escaped in printing.” The list is frank about the compositors’ struggles with a text they were setting for the first time, and it is one of the reasons the book has always been read as a key document in the history of English-language typography.<\/p>\n

The errata list is unusual enough to deserve a second look. Seventeenth-century printers rarely advertised their own mistakes, and when they did, the apology was perfunctory and the list short. Here the list is frank, and it covers not only stray letters and inverted sorts but whole lines that had been lifted or dropped in the setting of a long metrical text by compositors working in a shop with no precedent. Read today, it is a small window onto the ordinary difficulty of making a book: a press is not a machine that produces copies of a text but a sequence of human decisions, each of them capable of going wrong, and the 1640 psalter had more decisions per page than anything Stephen Daye had yet set. The corrections were printed in the book itself, which means that the owners of a copy were expected to read closely enough to find them, and to correct them. A book with a built-in errata list is a book meant to last.<\/p>\n

The surviving copies also preserve the physical story of the printing in ways that text alone cannot. The sheets were printed damp and came off the press limp, and they have shrunk and cockled accordingly, with the leaves of the eleven copies differing slightly in size because they came from different runs of the same forme and had been folded and gathered by different hands. The gatherings can be reconstructed: the volume was made up of a sequence of quires, some of which are made up in more than one way across the copies, which is exactly the sort of detail that lets a bibliographer distinguish one impression from another and assign individual copies to particular parts of the run. Where the binding survives, it does so in vellum over boards, sewn in a manner that leaves the spine open, and at least one copy still carries its original binding from the seventeenth century. These are not romantic survivals; they are the ordinary conditions of a working book that was never intended to be collected.<\/p>\n

The economics were modest. An estimated seventeen hundred copies of the first edition were printed, and they were sold for twenty pence. That price is the right scale to hold in mind: the psalter was not a luxury object but a working book for congregations that needed something to sing from, and the scale of the printing suggests that Stephen Daye and the Glovers expected a mass market rather than a handful of private buyers. Hezekiah Usher, who is generally identified as the first bookseller in British America, appears in the story from the beginning and later printed editions of the psalter explicitly for sale in his Boston shop. Whether he also sold the first edition from Cambridge is a reasonable conjecture and nothing more. What is not in doubt is that the press had commercial ambition from the beginning, and that the book it produced went into churches rather than into studies.<\/p>\n

The book also had a long working life, and the later editions say as much about the changing taste of New England as the first does about its beginnings. A new edition of 1651, extensively revised by Henry Dunster and Richard Lyon, was entitled The Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs of the Old and New Testament, faithfully translated into English metre<\/em>; it became the basis for every subsequent edition, and it is this revision, rather than the 1640 printing, that was popularly known as the New England Psalter or New England Version. By 1698 the psalter was being printed with notated music for the first time, thirteen tunes taken from John Playford’s A Breefe Introduction to the Skill of Musick<\/em> of 1654. In the eighteenth century the older volume was revised and reissued again and again, by Cotton Mather in 1718, by John Barnard of Marblehead in 1752, and by Thomas Prince in 1758, the last of them the same minister who had given the Boston copy to his congregation. In 1789 the Old South Church, having tried Prince’s revision and found it wanting, went back to the earlier edition published by Isaac Watts. The psalter stayed in use for well over a century. That is the measure of its success: not that it was admired, but that it was sung, argued over, and sung again.<\/p>\n

A Psalter Made in Cambridge<\/h2>\n

The Bay Psalm Book’s text is not a reprint. This is the point that most often gets lost when the book is reduced to a curiosity about the first American press, and it is the point on which the book’s real significance depends. When the settlers of Massachusetts Bay arrived, they brought psalters with them: the Ainsworth Psalter of 1612, compiled by Henry Ainsworth for use by the separatist communities in Holland; the Ravenscroft Psalter of 1621; and the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter of 1562, which was by then the standard English metrical psalter and existed in several editions. They were, in the words of the modern summary that most readers will encounter first, “evidently dissatisfied with the translations from Hebrew in these several psalters and wished for some that were closer to the original.” Their solution was to commission a new one.<\/p>\n

The committee they appointed was large. The sources describe thirty ministers, among them Richard Mather, Thomas Mayhew and John Eliot, names that would appear on nearly every list of the intellectual leadership of early New England. The new translation was made in America, by men who knew both Hebrew and the English metrical tradition, and it was cast into verse so that it could be sung to tunes the congregations already knew. The familiar tunes of the Ainsworth and Sternhold and Hopkins psalters were kept; the words beneath them were new.<\/p>\n

It is worth being precise about what that produced, because the result is unlike anything else in the English psalter tradition. The music itself was not printed in the 1640 volume: congregations used the psalters they already owned for the tunes, and the new book supplied only the words. The verse follows the divisions of the inherited English metrical psalter, with alternative versifications supplied where the freshly translated wording would not fit the old tune. So a worshipper in a Cambridge meeting house in 1641 would have had the English psalter of the previous generation open on one bench and the Bay Psalm Book open on the other, and would have sung the new words to the old melodies, noticing where the fit was tight. That hybrid is the book’s defining character. It is not a psalm book in the modern sense of a fresh set of words with music written for them; it is a new English text forced into the shape of an inherited tune, with the seams left visible and the errata list there to tell the reader where they run.<\/p>\n

That combination is the heart of the book, and it explains why the Bay Psalm Book sounds more archaic than its date. A reader coming to it from the King James Bible meets a strange mixture: a fresh translation and a conservative frame. The psalms are divided into the English metrical sections that the medieval English psalter tradition had already established, and the book supplies alternative versifications where the inherited forms did not fit the new wording. That frame has a long ancestry, and tracing it is the way to see how deeply the settlers were still standing inside English religious culture even as they left it. The English metrical psalter of the sixteenth century is itself a descendant of the psalters produced for English readers in the later Middle Ages, the tradition associated with the Wycliffite Bible and with the later sixteenth-century revisions that produced the Coverdale, Geneva and Authorised psalters. The Bay Psalm Book is a leaf on that tree, and a particularly strange one, because it was grown in New England rather than England, and because it was made at the moment when the tree was being deliberately re-engineered to bring the psalms closer to the Hebrew than any earlier English version had managed.<\/p>\n

Nobody involved pretended the work was finished. The errata list records the difficulties of fitting a new English wording into an inherited metrical frame, and the “Admonition to the Reader” that precedes the psalms tells the reader how to use the book and admits, in effect, that the verse is a servant of the sense rather than its master. The result, in the judgement of most readers, is uneven: some psalms sing well and some do not, and the book has never been used in American churches the way the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter was. Some of the tunes it used survived in later American hymnody; the translations themselves did not remain in use. That is the measure of the failure, and it is worth keeping in view precisely because the book succeeded in the ways that mattered to the people who made it.<\/p>\n

John Cotton’s preface explains why the book mattered so much. His argument, which fills the twelve pages that stand between the title page and the first psalm, is that singing the scriptures in the congregation is not a permitted decoration of worship but a requirement of it, and that the singing of psalms is the form in which the congregation itself becomes the voice of the Bible. It is a piece of Massachusetts polemic, and it is aimed at a specific target: the position, common in England at the time, that the psalms should be sung in a form the congregation could not necessarily follow, or that only parts of them should be sung at all. Cotton’s psalter is a reply in print to a dispute about the proper performance of scripture. The 1640 volume is therefore not only a devotional book but an argument with a voice, and the printing of that argument in Cambridge, in the first year the press could work, is what makes the book a document of the New England settlement’s intellectual formation as much as of its printing history. The preface explains the committee, the metre, the tunes and the errata: all of them exist because a group of ministers had decided that the psalms had to be put back into the mouths of ordinary people, and that the first step towards that was to get the words right.<\/p>\n

It is also worth keeping in view what the book is not. It is not the Wycliffite Bible, and it does not attempt Wycliffe’s project of translating the whole scriptures into English. The history of the English Bible before 1640 is a history of successive attempts to put the full text into the vernacular, and the psalter had its own line of descent within it. The Bay Psalm Book is one episode in that line, and it is distinctive not because it broke with the tradition but because it carried the tradition across an ocean and set it down in a place where no one had ever heard it sung.<\/p>\n

What Survives<\/h2>\n

Of an estimated seventeen hundred copies, eleven are known to survive, and only five of those are complete. Those figures are the usual reason the Bay Psalm Book appears in auction catalogues and record books, but they also tell a more interesting story than the price tags do, because the pattern of survival is the pattern of how early American books were actually treated.<\/p>\n

Consider where the copies ended up. The copy that has the longest documented American provenance was made in 1640, and by 1758 it had been bequeathed to Old South Church in Boston by Thomas Prince, the minister and historian who would go on to build one of the great private libraries of colonial America. Old South Church kept it, and the book passed into the Rare Book Collection of the Boston Public Library, where it has now been fully digitised, page by page, making visible for the first time to anyone with a connection to the internet the whole of the first edition as printed. That trajectory, from a working church book to a civic treasure, is the ordinary biography of the object: the Bay Psalm Book mattered to its owners first as a thing to sing from, and only later as a thing to keep.<\/p>\n

The copy now at Yale University came by a different road. It was owned by the Old South Church between 1750 and 1850, then passed through the Crowninshield family, Henry Stevens, and George Brinley of Hartford, and was bought by Cornelius Vanderbilt II in 1879. It was inherited by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and owned by her until her death in 1942, after which the Friends of the Library of Yale University bought it for one hundred and fifty-one thousand dollars in 1947. The chain is a reminder of how books travelled in the nineteenth-century Anglo-American republic: through sale, through inheritance, and through the collections of men and women who were building private museums of a new nation’s literature.<\/p>\n

The American Antiquarian Society’s copy is the story of almost nothing happening. It lacks its title page and pages 295 to 296, but it retains its original vellum binding, and it was bought as part of a lot of old books by William Bentley in May 1804 for thirty-six cents. Bentley was a Salem bookseller and librarian who built one of the finest collections of Americana of his century, and the fact that the psalter turned up in his lot for the price of a couple of small change, and stayed in his circle of collectors, is probably the closest this book ever came to being lost.<\/p>\n

The copy that made the headlines was the other of the two Old South Church copies, the one auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York on 26 November 2013. It was bought for fourteen million one hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars by the financier David Rubenstein, and the hammer price set a record for a printed book, surpassing the sum paid in 2010 for Audubon’s Birds of America<\/em>. The buyer lent the volume to Duke University, where it was shown in the American Beginnings exhibition of the Duke University Libraries in 2015. There is an odd ethical weight in this. A book made to be sung from in a Congregationalist church, whose text was a deliberate act of cultural self-definition by a community that had crossed an ocean to escape the church of England, now travels as a treasure of the art market, and its price is set by auction houses rather than by congregations.<\/p>\n

Four more copies complete the census, and each of them has been somewhere interesting. The Harvard copy, in the Houghton Library, is incomplete, missing ten leaves, and is thought to have been acquired in the effort to replace a library destroyed by fire in 1764; it was owned by Middlecott Cooke of the Harvard class of 1723, and carries the signature of John Leverett, later governor of the colony. The copy at Brown University, in the John Carter Brown Library, has the tightest claim of any to being the book as its makers knew it: it was originally the property of Richard Mather, one of the thirty ministers who made the translation, and passed later to Thomas Prince, before John Carter Brown acquired it in 1881. The Huntington Library’s copy carries an inscription of 1844, laid into the book by Sara Shuttleworth as she passed it to her daughter; it was bought from a Boston antique shop by Bishop John Fletcher Hurst, then by E. Dwight Church in 1903, and came to Henry E. Huntington with the rest of Church’s library in 1911. The most recently discovered of the eleven is the copy now at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, bought for a hundred and fifty pounds by A. S. W. Rosenbach in 1933 from a dealer in Belfast, and briefly stolen from the museum in 1949 by a student acting out a fraternity initiation.<\/p>\n

The Bodleian Library’s copy is complete, and it is the only one of the eleven held outside the United States. It was formerly the property of Bishop Thomas Tanner, the Anglican Bishop of Oxford, and it passed to the university in 1735 as part of the valuable book collection he bequeathed to the Bodleian. It is this copy that underlies the modern facsimile editions, including MacCulloch’s of 2014, with which this journal’s own readers are most likely to be familiar.<\/p>\n

One further detail is worth recording, because it shows how the trade in these books could damage them. According to the Library of Congress, one of its copies lacks its title page and eighteen leaves; twelve of those missing leaves were removed at some point to complete a copy now in the New York Public Library. Dealers in the nineteenth century completed imperfect copies by borrowing leaves from imperfect copies. The result is that the eleven survivors are not eleven independent witnesses to the printing but, in a few cases, fragments of a single witness that has been redistributed across three institutions. Any collation of the copies has to account for this, and it is a standing reminder that the history of a book is also the history of the people who owned, sold, stole and repaired it.<\/p>\n

The bibliography of the volume was established in the same period that the copies were being dispersed, and it is one of the oldest and most useful bibliographies of an American book. Wilberforce Eames drew up a list of the editions of the Bay Psalm Book, or of what he called the New England version of the Psalms, for the Library of Congress, and that list, together with the collations he and his successors made among the surviving copies, remains the framework for all subsequent work on the book. It records not only the editions themselves but the price and the format of each, and it established the terminology still in use: the “New England psalter” or “New England version” for the psalm text that the book carried, a name used to distinguish it from the English psalters from which it descended and which it displaced.<\/p>\n

One further historical thread belongs with the survival of the copies, and it concerns what the book did afterwards. The 1640 edition was followed by a second edition, also from Daye’s press, in 1642, and by further editions through the later colonial decades, some of them printed for sale in Boston by Hezekiah Usher. The psalter held its place in the churches of New England for well over a century, though from the early eighteenth century it was displaced congregation by congregation rather than all at once. It was not displaced because it was thought inferior but because better English versions and better music arrived, and because a rising population of churches preferred the newer psalters with their newer tunes. The decline of the Bay Psalm Book, in other words, is a story about taste rather than about piety, and it happened long after the book had stopped being printed.<\/p>\n

The long history of that decline was traced early. H. C. Macdougall’s Early New England Psalmody<\/em>, first published in 1902, took the 1640 psalter as the starting point of a narrative that ran forward to the singing books of the eighteenth century and backward to the psalmody the settlers had brought with them across the Atlantic. It is the kind of study that changes the question one asks of the book: not why was the first American printing remarkable, but what kind of musical and devotional life does it belong to. The Bay Psalm Book reads very differently once it is placed at the head of a tradition rather than treated as an isolated feat of machinery.<\/p>\n

Back into Print<\/h2>\n

Because so few copies survive, and because they are dispersed and in several cases incomplete, the printed book itself would have been effectively unavailable to scholars had nothing been done to reproduce it. The history of the Bay Psalm Book’s return to print is therefore also the history of its return to scholarship.<\/p>\n

The first substantial step was taken in 1903, when the New England Society reprinted the first edition and commissioned an introduction from Wilberforce Eames. Eames was the librarian of the American Antiquarian Society and one of the founding figures of bibliographical scholarship in America; his introductory account, which took the work apart typographically, set the terms for every discussion that followed. The reprint made the book available to libraries and to students at a scale that hand-copied readings could never achieve, and it established the habit of treating the Bay Psalm Book as a bibliographical object as well as a text. That reprint is still freely available in digitised form, which means that the edition of 1640 can be consulted today, in full, by anyone with a connection to the internet.<\/p>\n

The next edition, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1956, was the most consequential scholarly event in the book’s modern history. It reproduced the first edition in facsimile and bound alongside Zolt\u00e1n Haraszti’s The Enigma of the Bay Psalm Book: The First Book Printed in British North America, 1640<\/em>. Haraszti was a Hungarian scholar of the language and typography of early printing, and his book was, in effect, the first full modern critical study of the volume. He took the psalm text apart against its English and Latin predecessors, examined the errata, analysed the type and the setting, and asked why this particular translation had been made in this particular place at this particular moment. The word “enigma” in his title was not a coy choice; it announced that the book posed a puzzle that a careful philologist could work at for a lifetime. His study remains the standard item to read alongside the facsimile, and its reappearance in print has kept the argument alive for a new generation of readers.<\/p>\n

The third edition, produced in 1980 with the Massachusetts Historical Society and Colonial Williamsburg, was based on the Bodleian copy and carried an introduction by Diarmaid MacCulloch. Where Haraszti had been a philologist of the printing, MacCulloch was a historian of the Reformation, and his introduction shifted the frame: the Bay Psalm Book became an episode in the history of what he calls the Reformation’s long afterlife, an object in which the anxieties of separatists who had rejected the English church and the practical necessities of a new colony are visible at once. MacCulloch’s own facsimile edition, published by the Bodleian Library in 2014, and the reprintings that followed it, have kept the book in print and in teaching.<\/p>\n

Digitisation has now gone further than the facsimiles could. The Library of Congress’s World Digital Library scan of a copy of the 1640 edition is available online in full, and in 2026 the copy long held by Old South Church and now in the Rare Book Collection of the Boston Public Library was digitised in its entirety, including the pages that had been missing from the working copy for most of its life. The 1903 Eames reprint has been freely available for years. A reader with a laptop can now turn every page of the first American book without travelling, without writing, and without the special permission that a visit to a rare book room once required. For a volume whose entire significance depends on how it looks on the page, that is not a small gain; it converts a bibliographic curiosity into an open document, and it means that the questions Haraszti asked in 1956 can be asked again, in detail, by anyone.<\/p>\n

What the facsimiles preserve, and what they cannot, is worth stating. A facsimile gives you the page: the type, the spacing, the ornaments, the errata, the binding, the wear. It does not give you the sheets, which were damp when printed and have shrunk and cockled, or the binding that a copy may have had when new, or the sound of a congregation singing from it in a wooden meeting house with the windows shuttered against the Massachusetts winter. The Bay Psalm Book’s survival is a survival of objects rather than of a text, and that is why it has remained so strange. It is the only surviving specimen of the first press in British North America, and it contains the only surviving specimen of the first American metrical psalter. The eleven copies are not eleven opportunities to own a treasure. They are eleven chances to look at the same page, and to ask the question the book was made to answer in the first place: what does it mean, in a place with no printing of its own, to set type for the words of the psalms?<\/p>\n

References<\/h2>\n
    \n
  1. Bay Psalm Book<\/a> \u2014 Wikipedia, Wikipedia Foundation<\/li>\n
  2. The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre (Cambridge, 1640), digitised copy, Old South Church copy<\/a> \u2014 Digital Commonwealth, Boston Public Library<\/li>\n
  3. The Bay Psalm Book Sale, lot 1<\/a> \u2014 Sotheby’s, New York, 26 November 2013<\/li>\n
  4. Bay Psalm Book is most expensive printed work at $14.2m<\/a> \u2014 BBC News, 27 November 2013<\/li>\n
  5. American Beginnings, featuring the Bay Psalm Book<\/a> \u2014 Duke University Libraries, 2015<\/li>\n
  6. Thomas Tanner (bishop)<\/a> \u2014 Wikipedia, the Bishop of Oxford whose collection the Bodleian received in 1735<\/li>\n
  7. Houghton Library<\/a> \u2014 Wikipedia, the Harvard library holding the incomplete copy<\/li>\n
  8. John Carter Brown Library<\/a> \u2014 Wikipedia, the Brown library holding the copy from Richard Mather<\/li>\n
  9. Huntington Library<\/a> \u2014 Wikipedia, the library holding the copy from E. Dwight Church<\/li>\n
  10. Rosenbach Museum & Library<\/a> \u2014 Wikipedia, the Philadelphia institution holding the most recently discovered copy<\/li>\n
  11. Catalogue record for The whole booke of Psalmes (1640), copy of the American Antiquarian Society<\/a> \u2014 American Antiquarian Society<\/li>\n
  12. The Bay Psalm Book: being a facsimile reprint of the first edition, printed by Stephen Daye at Cambridge, in New England in 1640<\/a> \u2014 introduction by Wilberforce Eames, New England Society, 1903<\/li>\n
  13. The Enigma of the Bay Psalm Book: The First Book Printed in British North America, 1640<\/a> \u2014 Zoltan Haraszti, University of Chicago Press, 1956<\/li>\n
  14. Bay Psalm Book: facsimile edition with an introduction by Diarmaid MacCulloch<\/a> \u2014 Massachusetts Historical Society and Colonial Williamsburg, 1980; reprinted Applewood Books, 2006<\/li>\n
  15. A List of Editions of the Bay Psalm Book or New England Version of the Psalms<\/a> \u2014 Wilberforce Eames, Library of Congress, 1900<\/li>\n
  16. Early New England Psalmody: An Historical Appreciation, 1620-1820<\/a> \u2014 H. C. Macdougall, New York, 1902<\/li>\n
  17. The Bay Psalm Book (Cambridge, 1640), digitised copy<\/a> \u2014 World Digital Library, Library of Congress<\/li>\n
  18. The History of Printing in America<\/a> \u2014 Isaiah Thomas, Worcester, 1810<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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