The Bay Psalm Book was the first book, that is still in existence, printed in British North America.
The book is a Psalter, first printed in 1640 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Psalms in it are metrical translations into English. The translations are not particularly polished, and none have remained in use, although some of the tunes to which they were sung have survived (for instance, "Old 100th.".) However its production, a mere 20 years after the Pilgrim Fathers arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts, represents a considerable achievement. It went through several editions and remained in use for well over a century.
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The early residents of the Massachusetts Bay Colony brought with them several books of psalms: the Ainsworth Psalter (1612), compiled by Henry Ainsworth for use by Puritan "separatists" in Holland; the Ravenscroft Psalter (1621); and the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter (1562, of which there were several editions). Evidently they were dissatisfied with the translations from Hebrew in these several psalters, and wished for some that were closer to the original. They hired "thirty pious and learned Ministers", including Richard Mather and John Eliot,[1] to undertake a new translation, which they presented here. The tunes to be sung to the new translations were the familiar ones from their existing psalters.
The first printing was the third product of the Stephen Daye press, and consisted of a hundred and forty-eight small quarto leaves, including a twelve-page preface, "The Psalmes in Metre," "An Admonition to the Reader," and an extensive list of errata headed "Faults escaped in printing."
The third edition (1651) was extensively revised by Henry Dunster and Richard Lyon. The revision was entitled The Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs of the Old and New Testament, faithfully translated into English meetre. This revision was the basis for all subsequent editions, and was popularly known as the New England Psalter or New England Version. The ninth edition (1698), the first to contain music, included 13 tunes from John Playford's A Breefe Introduction to the Skill of Musick (London, 1654).[2]
The title page of the first edition of 1640 reads:
Faithfully
TRANSLATED into ENGLISH
Metre.
Whereunto is prefixed a discourse
declaring not only the lawfullnes, but also
the necessity of the heavenly Ordinance
of singing Scripture Psalmes in
the Churches of God.
Cambridge, Mass. Stephen Day
Eleven copies of the first edition of the Bay Psalm Book are known still to exist. One of them is in the Library of Congress, one is owned by Yale University, one by Harvard University, one by Brown University, one by the American Antiquarian Society, one by the Rosenbach Museum & Library and two, housed in the Rare Book Collection at the Boston Public Library, are owned by Old South Church in Boston.
On September 17, 2009, Swann Galleries auctioned an early edition of the Bay Psalm Book, circa 1669-1682, bound with an Edinburgh Bible, for $57,600 — an auction record for any edition of the work. (A 1648 edition fetched $15,000 in 1983, and no other early edition had appeared on the auction market since).
