Psalm Book Could Fetch Record Price

From The Wall Street Journal

In 1640, Puritans settling in the frontier that became Massachusetts found a fresh way to annoy the Church of England they'd left behind: translating and printing their own book of psalms—including this reworded first line of Psalms 23: "The Lord to me a shepherd is, want therefore shall I not." (Take that, King James.)

Now, Boston's Old South Church is planning to sell a rare copy of the psalms—the first book printed in America—for $15 million to $30 million at Sotheby's in New York this fall. If the church gets its asking price, the Bay Psalm Book will be the most expensive book ever sold at auction, surpassing an $11.5 million copy of James Audubon's "Birds of America" that Sotheby's sold three years ago.

In 1947, the last time another version of the psalm book came up for auction, it sold for $151,000—a record price at the time that topped sales of Shakespeare's First Folio and the Gutenberg Bible. Only 11 copies of the psalm book survive today; Yale, Brown and Harvard universities own other versions, as does the Library of Congress.

More here-

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324695104578417013378442712.html