The Book of Common Prayer | |||||||
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The Standard BookEach time the 1790 Prayer Book of the Episcopal Church was modified by General Convention, a "Standard Book" was issued, to which all other books printed were supposed to be compared for accuracy. It is clear from contemporary documents that many at the time considered the 1892 revision to be just another in this series — a more extensive revision, to be sure, but still fundamentally no different than the series of modifications which had been happening since the first U. S. Prayer was issued. However, it is clear that the Standard Book issued for the 1892 revision was different in a number of ways: possibly because the revision was much more extensive than previously, possibly because the Episcopal Church considered itself to be more powerful and significant than it did previously, and possibly just because J. P. Morgan was on the revision committee. In any event, there were three separate (and hopefully textually identical) "Standard Books" issued for the 1892 BCP. They are:
All of these were
printed by the DeVinne Press, and supervised by Daniel Berkeley Updike,
one of the giants of American typography. I have not seen a copy of the
second, canonically required edition, but the other two are identical
in typography in every way, only differing in the elaborate decoration,
paper, and binding of the third, commercially-available edition. |
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We also have an article, "Evolution of the Standard Prayer Book of 1892", which appeared in a Church-related journal, The Independent, probably in 1893. It focusses more on the process leading up to the physical production of the book, rather than its content. Additionally, Google Books has the Report of the Committee Appointed to Prepare a Standard Book of Common Prayer (i. e., this book) from 1893; also we have an 1895 Supplemental Report from the same committee, which additionally contains an appendix by Mr. Updike describing the book's decorations. Google Books also has a small book by William Stevens Perry, Bishop of Iowa, comparing this Standard with the previous of 1871. The links in the Table of Contents below lead to Adobe Acrobat (PDF) versions of the services of the Convention delegates' edition. These reproduce exactly the "look and feel" of the original; you will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader (free from Adobe) to view them. The font used here is Bitstream's DeVinne, which duplicates the original very closely. The PDF pages, though, are designed to be printed on standard 8.5 x 11" paper, as opposed to the original page size of about 6-7/8" by 10-3/8", resulting in somewhat wider margins. The texts should be otherwise identical in every way. Besides the individual services listed below, we also have all of them in a single PDF file (size = ~2.8MB)
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Title page, subscribers' edition (Griffiths 1893/7) |
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TABLE OF CONTENTS.
The Form and
Manner of Making, Ordaining, and Consecrating Bishops,
Priests, and Deacons |
Download or read the large subscribers' edition (size = 68MB) |
Return to the 1892 Book of Common Prayer
Web author: Charles Wohlers | U. S. England Scotland Ireland Wales Canada World |