Historic psalm book could fetch $30m

[dipsydoodle]

The first book to be printed in America – a modest little brown book of psalms described as "a mythical rarity" – will be auctioned in November by a Boston church and is expected to fetch up to $30m (£20m).

Only 11 of the 1,700 copies printed in 1640 of the Bay Psalm Book are known to survive, and the Old South church in the heart of Boston owns two of them. The last time a copy came up for sale was in 1947, when it set a world record price for any printed book. At $151,000, it fetched more than anyone had then paid for rarities such as a Shakespeare first folio – a good copy sold in the same auction season for only $22,000 – a Gutenberg bible or the gigantic, dazzlingly illustrated Audubon's Birds of America.

The psalm book was printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the congregationalist puritans who wanted a version of the psalms which they believed closer to the Hebrew original than the ones they brought with them from England.

Although an almanac may have been printed earlier, possibly on the same press, the Whole Booke of Psalmes is generally agreed to be the earliest bound true book and – because of the scholarship of members of the community, including John Cotton, Richard Mather and John Eliot – the first book written in America as well.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2013/apr/17/historic-bay-psalm-book-30million