The 1928 Book of Common Prayer served the Episcopal Church for fifty years, from 1928 until 1978. We are presenting this electronic version of the U. S. 1928 Book of Common Prayer in hopes that it will prove useful and instructive to the Church. Parishes might find it useful in recreating historical services, for example, to celebrate the anniversary of the parish. Others might find it instructive to compare the changes, additions, and deletions, which have taken place in the various versions of the Book of Common Prayer.

The 1928 revision was very extensive - perhaps the most radical U. S. prayer book revision until that of 1979. Some of the many changes from the previous 1892 book included dropping liturgies of rather outdated theology, such as the Visitation of Prisoners; the three baptism rites were combined into one; and several changes were made to the Communion service, including further deemphasis of the Decalogue, and rearrangement of the Lord's Prayer and the Prayer of Humble Access back to the position they had in the Prayer Book of 1549. Other changes can be seen by comparison of this text with that of the 1892 Book. A fuller description of the changes made in this book is given in The New American Prayer Book, by E Clowes Chorley (1929), which was written to introduce people to this Prayer Book.

Besides the files listed below, we also have the 1928 BCP formatted for PDA's (Palm OS and Pocket PC), thanks to the author, Dan Muller. You will need the Palm eReader software to read it (it's free). We also have it as a zipped (compressed) file which includes a readme and an Excel table for calculating the dates of Sundays. Dan has also made this file available in ePub format, which can be read on all eBook readers, other than the Kindle. Finally, we do have the 1928 BCP available for the Kindle.

Online Morning and Evening Prayer using the 1928 BCP is available from commonprayer.org and from episcopalnet.org.

We also have the Office of Compline, published as part of A Book of Offices in 1914-17, which was apparently in use throughout the period of this book.

The files below are in HTML (formatted for your browser) and in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) formats. The free Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to view the PDF files. HTML files of the 1928 BCP are also available from episcopalnet.org

The files are also available in a single ZIP-compressed file in WordPerfect format. This file, once uncompressed, is editable by most all full-featured Word Processing programs (e. g., MS Word, OpenOffice, etc.). The font used is Bitstream's version of Century Old Style, which appears to be nearly identical to that of the original text. You will need this font installed on your computer in order to maintain the formatting.

The 1928 BCP underwent two small revisions. First, in 1936, the font size for servies following the Psalter (Ordinal, etc.) was increased, thus increasing the page count from 598 to 611. Secondly, the lectionary and the rubrics associated with it were extensively revised in 1945. Both versions of the lectionary are presented below: one which was in use from 1928 - 1944, and the other, which was used from 1945 - 1978. We have all three versions are available for download as PDF graphics. All have extractable text, but this has not been proofread and undoubtedly will contain errors. See below for links.

We also have online another set of PDF files of the 1928 BCP which reproduces the original Standard Book, designed by Daniel Berkeley Updike and printed at his Merrymount Press in 1930. This is considered one of the classics of American book publishing.

The development of this book took over 15 years, and is documented by Reports and a Proposed Book here.