Hachette's FaithWords imprint, taking note of four years of record Bible sales for Christian publishers in the U.S., is releasing its first Bible on March 10. The Majestic Illuminated Bible is a King James Version with 100 full-color illustrations that call to mind stained glass windows.
PW spoke with Daisy Hutton, VP and publisher for Hachette Nashville, and Bible designer and typographer Klaus Erik Krogh, CEO of 2KDenmark, about the development of the Bible. The images, they said, are modernized versions of the woodcuts in a German Bible published in 1561 in the heart of the Protestant Reformation.
"When Klaus showed us these illustrations and talked about the concept of the Bible," Hutton recalls, "it felt like such a beautiful fit with who we are and who we aspire to be."
"Like stained glass," Krogh said, "the illustrations are meant both to inspire and to teach—engaging the eye as well as the heart."
It also aligns with another major trend, the soaring popularity of graphic novels. "People today don't just want the words, they want the vision as well," says Hutton. "The art makes the Bible a full experience."
While children's storybook Bibles are always colorfully illustrated, many Bibles for adults only include color images for the maps of the Holy Land, often tucked at the back of the book.
Here, the illustrations are in every book of the Bible, from a lush scene of creation for Genesis that's repeated on the cover, to Saul's God-struck moment of conversion that led him to become Paul the Apostle, to the triumphant conclusion of Revelation on the last page. For each of the gospels, there's a scene of the saint who wrote it and a symbol associated with him, like the eagle shown with St. John, representing the heights of spiritual insight.
"Our hope," Hutton says, "is that people will really love The Majestic Illuminated Bible and we'll have the opportunity to create other Bibles, devotionals, and commentaries."
