the name of the whole community, which gives some information concerning this and other publications.[1] The Pirmasens edition seems to have been unknown to them. Shem Zook, an Amish Mennonite, had a quarto edition published in Philadelphia in 1849, and John F. Funk, of Elkhart, Indiana, issued another in 1870. An imperfect English translation by I. D. Rupp appeared in 1837, and in 1853 a translation by the Hanserd Knollys Society of London was in course of preparation, and was afterward published.
Copies of the Ephrata edition are, as has been said, exceedingly scarce. A copy has been known to bring thirty-two dollars among farmers at a country sale, and one which had found its way into the hands of Frederik Muller & Co., in Amsterdam, was held at 180 florins. There is one in the library of the German Society in Philadelphia, one in that of the Mennonite College at Amsterdam, and another in that of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, but to the great libraries elsewhere it is as yet unknown. Having regard to the motives which led to its publication, the magnitude of the undertaking, the labor and time expended in printing it leaf by leaf upon a handpress, its colossal size, excellent typography, the quality of its paper made at Ephrata, its historical and genealogical value, and its great rarety, it easily stands at the head of our colonial books. Among the literary achievements of the Germans of Pennsylvania it surpasses, though eight years later, the great quarto Bible of Saur, the first in America, printed at Germantown in 1743, which for nearly half a century had no English rival.
- ↑ I have the editions of 1660, 1685, 1748, 1780, and 1814. They cannot be found together anywhere else.
