A few years before he left, the rarity and consequent costliness of all polyglot bibles gave Samuel Bagster the idea of supplying a convenient and inexpensive edition.
The production of English bibles was a monopoly in the United Kingdom, confined in England to the king's printer and the two great universities, in Scotland to Sir D. H. Blair and John Bruce, and in Ireland to Mr. Grierson.
Every detail in its production was superintended by the publisher, who introduced a new style of binding in the best Turkey Morocco, with flexible tight backs, the sheets being sewed with thin thread or silk.
An edition was printed of a quarto French, Italian, Spanish, and German Bible, which was destroyed by fire on the premises in March 1822, when only twenty-three copies of the New Testament portion were preserved.
A folio edition of the polyglot was published in 1828, repeated in 1831, and subsequently, presenting eight languages at the opening of the volume, and including all the ancient and modern versions above mentioned.
Although best known for publishing religious works, other books were sometimes issued, including 'A Synoptical Compend of British Botany, Arranged After the Linnean System' by John Galpine.
In 1824, Bagster circulated the prospectus of a polyglot grammar in twenty or thirty languages upon the principles of comparative philology, also the suggestion of Greenfield, who in 1827 edited for the publisher his 'Comprehensive Bible,’ with 4,000 illustrative notes, 500,000 marginal references, a general introduction, and a variety of other useful information.
[1] The well-known motto of the firm, "πολλαὶ μὲν θνητοῖς γλῶτται, μία δ'ἀθανάτοισιν" ("The inhabitants of earth have many tongues, those of heaven have but one"), is said to have been due to the Rev.