New York Times

Image:
The Pennyroyal Caxton Press, 1998 "And the Sea Stopped Raging," illustrated by Barry Moser, from "The Pennyroyal Caxton Bible."

May 26, 1999

With Artist's Devotion and Long Hours, Unusual Bible Takes Shape

By GUSTAV NIEBUHR

ATFIELD, Mass. -- In a cozy and neatly kept studio at his home here, the artist Barry Moser has been working on a task that recalls a much earlier historical era, creating hundreds of individual images to illustrate the Bible, from Creation to Apocalypse.

Since early 1996, Moser, who is widely known as an illustrator of children's books and classics, has devoted each day to working on what will total 231 engravings for an unusual edition of the King James version of the Bible.

Over the last three decades he has done illustrations for "Moby-Dick," "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and much else. But his current project has engaged him with a seriousness beyond anything in his previous work.

"Nothing else ever obsessed me," Moser said, in a voice resonant of his Tennessee roots. "I've become so obsessed with this, I dream about it. I've had dreams about conversations with the Blessed Virgin. I've had dreams about having conversations with the Apostle Paul."

He added, "There is no way this project could be approached with any kind of lightheartedness." His Bible, in two volumes and of a size and heft usually found on church lecterns, will be a thing of luxury, printed in only 400 copies, an instant rarity. Its type will be modeled on a 16th-century form, its paper specially made by a four-century-old German company.

His effort is reaching completion at the very time that another unusual Bible project is just beginning. In March an order of Benedictine monks in Minnesota announced plans to create what they described as the only handwritten, illuminated Bible to be commissioned since Gutenberg invented movable type in the 15th century.

When Moser's Bible is published in October, it will be called the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible. The name combines that of the Pennyroyal Press -- Moser is its proprietor -- and that of the company of his financial backer. Each copy will cost $10,000.

Each Bible in an even more exclusive 30-copy run will cost more than twice that; it will be printed on handmade paper and bound in five volumes, and carry an additional suite of prints and other archival material. Moser said his goal "is to produce one of the most beautiful books of the century."

(For those of ordinary means, there will also be a trade edition, published by Viking Studio.)

Illustrating the Bible is an ancient art form, dating back to post-Roman-era Christian scribes who painted miniature scenes on parchment. The craft came to full flower under Charlemagne's patronage, with monks creating illuminated manuscripts. Even after the invention of movable type, the tradition continued. The first complete English-language Bible, in 1535, contained more than 150 woodblock prints.

But for a single artist to produce hundreds of illustrations for both the Old and New Testaments is exceptionally rare. The person who is best known for having done so is probably Gustave Dore, a Frenchman whose illustrated Holy Bible was published in 1865.

In this century a few prominent painters have created their own interpretations of biblical texts, most notably Marc Chagall, who produced an illustrated Hebrew Bible. But the sheer number of illustrations by Dore 130 years ago and Moser today, as well as the fact that their work encompasses both Testaments, puts them in a special category. For those who study religion and contemporary art, Moser's project is unusual, too, in that America's Protestant culture has never been especially encouraging of serious efforts to illustrate the Bible.

William Dyrness, dean of the school of theology at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., said, "In the American tradition people tended to be a bit suspicious of using high art in a way because it distracted people from the literal word of the Bible." He said he had not known about Moser's project but was intrigued by it.

While Dore tended to favor crowded scenes in his illustrations, Moser focuses on individuals, which lends his engravings a memorable intensity. He portrays Jonah from the neck up, the prophet's head breaking the ocean's surface while the immense tail of the fish that will swallow him rises behind.

His infant Jesus sits in Mary's lap, the tiny arms outstretched in a gesture that anticipates the Crucifixion. But as an adult Jesus is a lonelier figure, depicted by Moser in a moment of magisterial solitude after being scourged by Roman soldiers and crowned with thorns. "I keep wanting to emphasize his isolation," Moser said, "because the Son of God would have to be isolated. He would have no contemporaries."

As an artist working in an era that prizes the individual above the crowd, Moser takes an approach that works as an act of biblical interpretation in its own right. As the Rev. Peter Gomes, minister at the Memorial Church at Harvard University, writes in "The Good Book" (Morrow, 1996): "The dynamic quality of Scripture has to do with the fact that while the text itself does not change, we who read that text do change; it is not that we adapt ourselves to the world of the Bible and play at recreating it as in a pageant or a tableau 'long ago and far away.' Rather, it is that the text actually adapts itself to our capacity to hear it."

Because the types of wood Moser thinks most suitable for engraving are scarce and very expensive, he uses a substance called Resingrave, a cast epoxy resin. "It's the stuff you see, basically, that lawn furniture is made out of," he said. "It's very strong, very brittle, and engraves like a dream, if the tools are sharp enough. It's the perfect substitute, as far as I'm concerned."

Of greater importance to the project, however, is Moser's self-discipline. "It's devotion," he said. "It's a certain degree of pig-headedness, simplemindedness, to sit between the 6's -- 6 in the morning, 6 in the evening -- seven days a week, 52 weeks a year."

He has also assembled an advisory board for his work: poets, religion scholars and technical specialists. The project has been underwritten by a collector of rare books, Bruce Kovner, chairman of Caxton Corp., an investment management company named for the English printer William Caxton.

Moser is a native of Chattanooga, Tenn., and so comes from a region, the South, that Flannery O'Connor described as "Christ-haunted." He was no more than conventionally religious, he said, until the winter afternoon in 1959 when he narrowly missed being struck by a hunter's stray bullet. Feeling that Providence had spared his life for a reason, he eventually became a minister, although he did not attend a seminary, and served in churches in Tennessee and Georgia. But he moved to New England 30 years ago and took up the study of engraving. His memories of his career as a minister are not warm. "Today I look back on that, and I think of the unmitigated arrogance of a 19-year-old kid to preach to older people and call them for their shortcomings," he said.

Moser no longer has any formal connection with a church, put off, he said, by instances of hypocrisy he encountered in congregations he served. But he possesses a sense of the religious history around him. On a brief visit to Northampton, Mass., he pointed out the brownstone church that stands on the site where Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century theologian, preached for much of his career.

Moser has undertaken religious subjects before, although not on the scale of this project. He illustrated a translation of Dante's "Divine Comedy" and an edition of John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress." He did preliminary designs for an illustrated Bible a decade ago.

But the inclination toward the current project goes further back. And as he has worked at it, so it has also achieved a force of its own. "I don't know what it is that has compelled me to do this," Moser said. "But something has been compelling me to do this ever since I was marching cadence in military school." He continued: "To what do I ascribe it? I don't know. Whatever it is that has compelled me to do this, is, I think, at work in it."

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company