An interesting announcement is made that Heinemann's, the publishers, are about to produce a new type of Bible, without chapter headings, conventional verses or double columps, and with some parts like genealogies, which everyone skips, omitted. The intention is to get people to read the Bible more as literature. Other purposes for which it is read may follow automatically.
The idea of course is not new. Years ago the Old Testament and the Apocrypha (it has always been a mystery to me why the latter is so difficult to obtain) were produced in Dents Everyman's Library, much as the new Bible is to be produced. Whether they were in consequence more read I do not know, but I could never see that their pages were more attractive to the eye than those of ordinary Bibles.
Then there have been the Bibles re-written in modern colloquial language. Prof. Goodspeed of Chicago University, a most learned theologian, published a New Testament in American slang, or largely so, about ten years ago. It was truly dreadful. Moffalt's work on these lines (minus the slang) has commanded great respect. There is quite a fashion of quoting him in the pulpit just now.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.