The ESV Heirloom Bible, Alpha Edition is a high-quality hand-size ESV from Crossway that’s both portable and readable. It’s available in black goatskin and brown Wellington leather, ISBN: 9781433591143, printed and bound in the Netherlands by Jongbloed.
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The cover is brown Wellington leather from Valencia, Spain by Cromwell. This is a high grade of cowhide. It’s smooth to the touch and looks and feels elegant. It’s dark brown and has a little bit of color variation. The leather does seem to take scratches easily, so it’s similar to Horween leather. The cover is stiff enough to hold flat in the hand. There is no printing on the front. The spine includes the standard ESV text dry stamped with no color on the spine. It has four raised hubs. The cover also includes perimeter stitching.
The liner is edge-lined leather. The tab isn’t as stiff as most Bibles of this size. The block is sewn. Due to the small size of the text block, it will take some use before it will stay open in Genesis. It includes two 1/4″ brown ribbons. They’re angle-cut and long enough to pull to the corner to open the Bible easily. The overall size is 5.5 x 7.6 x 1.25″, and it weighs 1 lb, 4.5 oz. This is the perfect size for carrying and reading.
The paper is a high-quality European Bible paper. It’s 28GSM and has a premium coating. It’s smooth to the touch and is highly opaque. The color is slightly cream, which is my personal favorite color for Bible paper. There is no glare under direct light find it great on the eyes for long periods of reading. It can take an extra second to turn the pages, but it’s not too difficult. The page edges are red under gold. It has more of a salmon color when the Bible is opened.
The 2016 ESV text is presented in a double-column, paragraph layout. It follows the standard ESV formatting with poetry set to stanzas and section headings that are semi-bold italics. The header shows the book name and reference in the outer margin and the page number in the center. Footnotes are placed in the footer starting on the left side of the page.
The typeface is 8-point, black letter. The text is dark and consistent throughout. It has extra whitespace in the text to make it highly readable. It was printed with line-matching, meaning that the lines on both sides of the page are printed in the same location to reduce show-through. Verse numbers are larger than normal to help make them easier to find. They’re not bold, so it will take an extra second to find them, but I did find the verses easy to locate. Footnote callers are large and bold, but they don’t stand out too much. I find the text to be highly readable.
Poetry follows the standard ESV method of heavily indenting when the text wraps to the next line. It also runs the line all the way to the end before wrapping. This causes the lines to have hyphens and many poetic lines have one word.
The standard ESV footnotes are placed at the bottom of the page and include the footnote number. References to parallel passages and quotes include letters. I prefer the footnotes to include references like these. The footnotes include Hebrew and Greek explanations, manuscript variations (without identifying the manuscript), information about objects, places, names, money, references where something is quoted, etc. The footnotes and their numbers are small, so they might be difficult to read.
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Specifications
- Cover Type: Wellington Leather
- ISBN: 9781433591143
- Page Count: 1344
- Weight: 1.69 lb
- Publisher: Crossway
- Publication Date: September 2023
- Type Size: 8.0
- Layout: Double Column
- Binding: Smyth-Sewn
- Cross-References: Yes
- Ribbon Markers: 2
See below for a 68 page excerpt from the Heirloom Alpha edition:
