I bought this Bible in 1975. I wanted a wide-margin KJV and, although the 1967 Scofield was available in wide-margin format, I did not want the text modifications used in that edition. For the day, this Bible was quite expensive. By the time I paid for shipping, the price tag was somewhere between $35-40.
This Bible retains the British spellings, for example, "colour" instead of "color," etc.
Here is the box, listing the Bible's features.
This Bible has seen a lot of use over the decades, and shows signs of wear, but it has held up remarkably well.
Although this is definitely a King James Version, and is identified as such on the box, it is never identified as such
inside! However, it does include the dedicatory epistle.
A neat little design, yes, but this is actually the Coat of Arms of Oxford University. The motto, Dominus illuminatio
mea, is from the first verse of Psalm 27 (Psalm 26 in the Latin Vulgate), "The LORD is my light."
This is a photo of the inside of the front cover, showing how the Morocco is folded to form a "lip" over the leather lining.
The leather lining and the thin India paper make this Bible very flexible.
There are 16 pages (8 leaves) of ruled paper at the front, and 16 pages in the back, for notes. I have used these for notes
of a more general nature, i.e., notes that are not specific to a book or passage.
A common feature in older editions of the KJV was a brief outline at the beginning of each chapter. This feature was not
specific to Oxford. We have an old Collins Bible that has this feature, and a 1988 edition of the Thompson Chain Reference
Bible also has it.
The first and last signitures of a Smyth-sown book take greater stress than the rest of the book. To help relieve this
stress, some Bibles (including our Oxford Reference Bible) have a feature called whipstitching.
Whipstitching is a seam sewn on the first half of the first
signiture, and the second half of the last signiture, to help hold together the pages that are closest to the covers.
This photo shows this seam on the second half of the last signiture of this Bible.
This photo was taken a little "closer in" to show the whipstitching in its relationship to the usual Smyth-sown threads.
In this photo, you can see three of the threads in the "gutter" of the signiture. These are common to any Smyth-sown
bindings. But notice the additional seam to the right of the gutter. This is the whipstitching.