Swann Galleries to Auction Virginia Man's Rare Bibles

In 1782, during the waning days of the American Revolution, Philadelphia printer Robert Aitken obtained the authorization of Congress to print a rather patriotic Bible. The tome would be printed in the Colonies, independent of the authority of the King of England, who had slapped an embargo on Bibles (and almost everything else) to the rebellious New World.

This endorsement by the secular of the spiritual would have been a flagrant violation of the church/state divide -- but it was nine years before that concept would be codified and ratified in the First Amendment. So Aitken printed 10,000 copies of his pocket-size Scripture, with the congressional plug on the very first page (Congress "recommend[s] this edition of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States.")

With piety and patriotism running high, and the supply of Bibles running low, Aitken could be forgiven for envisioning divinely sanctioned profits.

But the war ended the next year, higher-quality Bibles were imported en masse, and the Aitken Bible flopped. Most of them wound up in a Philadelphia church as handouts to the poor.

Today, an estimated 32 copies of "the Bible of the Revolution" remain. Antiquarian experts say perhaps 10 are in private hands.

Spotsylvania's Mel Meadows has two of them.

"Aitken tried to capitalize on the market," he says, "and it just didn't work out that way."

On Thursday, at a rare book auction in Manhattan, the 59-year-old retired real estate developer, a self-described devout Christian who avoids affiliation with any denomination and deeply dislikes "political Christians," is selling one of his copies. It's expected to go for $40,000 or more. In the same auction, he's also selling his copy of the Bay Psalm Book, a circa 1682 edition of the first book printed in British America (official title of that edition, a variation on the original:: "The Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs of the Old and New Testament, Faithfully Translated into English Metre.")

It is one of the rarest books in American publishing and this is the first time an early edition of the book has been on the public market in nearly a quarter-century. It, too, is expected to go for more than $40,000.

The sale of these and more than 100 other Bibles in Meadows's collection is "a very big deal," says Mark Dimunation, chief of the rare book and special collections division at the Library of Congress.

"The Aitken Bible alone is an icon of American book collecting," says William Reese, a New Haven, Conn., book dealer who is widely regarded as the nation's preeminent expert in early Americana publishing. "Its story is well known. It's a celebrated, famous thing."

Reese should know. He paid $60,000 for an Aitken Bible in pristine condition in 2008, the last time one came up for auction.