Reprise: A Visit to the Scriptorium By Reverend Christopher Calderhead

This article was written by Christopher Caldherhead in 2000. In addition to being a time capsule of the earliest days of the making of The Saint John’s Bible, this article also marked the beginning of the process that led to Calderhead’s book, Illuminating the Word: The Making of The Saint John’s Bible. The book is available for purchase here.

A Visit to the Scriptorium is the first installment in The Saint John’s Bible Heritage Program’s new series, Reprise, in which we unearth and illuminate stories written during the creation of the work. Subscribe to Sharing the Word for more installments of Reprise. 

On February 24, 2000, I looked out the window of a train heading westward across England. The landscape was bare, brown and grey in the soft winter daylight. We passed villages with ancient church towers. Electric pylons marched across the countryside. At one point the train stopped right next to a huge industrial site. Great concrete cooling towers loomed over us. A few miles on, in the distance I could make out a prehistoric chalk carving in the side of a hill: a huge white horse. The people next to me on the train were talking about university admissions. I was on my way to Wales to visit Donald Jackson’s Scriptorium. The train ride provided a clue of what I would find: something completely modern with roots in something very old indeed.

Mabel, who is married to Donald, picked me up at the station. We trundled my bags into the back of her old, beat up Volvo and headed off to The Hendre Hall.

“It’s been quite a week!” Mabel said and then laughed. A team of four calligraphers had arrived and begun the work of writing pages for the Bible. Only two of them were still there; the other two had decided this project wasn’t for them. As we drove on, Mabel told me about the ups and downs of managing a household full of people. The Saint John’s Bible is the collaborative effort of a whole team. Sally Mae Joseph is in charge of running the studio. She is Donald’s only in-house scribe and illuminator. There is the team of scribes, a computer consultant, an office manager, and a whole cast of characters including the gardener, the cleaning lady, and various members of Donald’s extended family. Mabel helps keep this team together by managing the household and logistics. She does it with great humor and patience.

As we traveled through the Welsh countryside, we left behind the bleak industrial landscape surrounding Newport and began to move up through hills and valleys. Soon we were deep in the countryside. The landscape is rugged and the road hugs the contours of the hills. Centuries of cultivation have left their mark on the land. We came to a crossroads where we waited for a single passing car so we could cross over. “Oh, there’s traffic,” Mabel said to herself.

I was arriving in the midst of a drama. Production was shifting into high gear. The preliminary design work was finished, and now Donald was training his group of scribes to begin writing out each page of the actual manuscript. The number of people working on the project was growing, and what had been a small and rather intimate process was now becoming a humming industry. The mood at The Hendre was changing as new people and new personalities were added to the team.

Mabel continued her story. Four calligraphers had come to The Hendre to take up the work. They were all professionals with great skill, but The Saint John’s Bible is not like any calligraphic project any of them had worked on before. The sheer size of the project and the demands of working in a team had proved quite a challenge.

Mabel said, “One of the calligraphers actually disappeared at one point-we had to ring the police!”

“The police? Why?” I asked.

“Well, it was very worrying. He just went off one day and no one knew where he’d gone.

He was struggling, I think, with the writing.”

What had happened was this: the calligraphers had arrived several weeks before.

 

Originally Donald had intended to train them for a week and then immediately set them to writing full pages of the manuscript. It had proved difficult to get the team ready to work so fast. Their different personalities had to mesh. They had to adapt quickly, not only to using new tools and materials but also to the script Donald had devised. One week of training became two and the scribes were still mastering Donald’s technique. This was much more complex than anyone had thought. Not only was there the question of a large leap in skills but also the scribes were being asked to practice their craft in a collaborative workshop setting. None of the team had ever worked in a major scriptorium like this. In fact, there are no scriptoria like this­ and there haven’t been since the invention of movable type revolutionized book production in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

One calligrapher decided to opt out early on. Another scribe was working hard to master the script but was finding the whole set up difficult. This task was not suited to everyone’s temperament and abilities. So one day he decided to take a walk, perhaps to think things through.

An hour passed and no one took much notice. Then two hours passed. The rest of the team began to get concerned. Finally, everyone set off on a search-and-find expedition and the police were called.

“He showed up hours later,” Mabel said. “In the end, it was nothing; he’d just taken himself off for a walk and a breath of fresh air. We were very relieved.”

He too decided to leave the project. Suddenly I knew why Donald had said to me on the phone, “You’re writing about the setting of the Scriptorium? The real story is what’s going on here with the calligraphers.” I was to hear much more about this drama in the days which followed.

An industrious household

The car pulled into the house at The Hendre Hall. Donald and Mabel live in a converted village hall, a rambling half-timbered building, beautiful against the hills which surround it. Donald keeps his own office in a wing of the Hall. Across the small road there is a group of small sheds and outbuildings, loosely grouped around a gravel courtyard and a grassy lawn. The main building is the Schoolroom, a converted mechanics’ shed, which has been renovated to make a fine Scriptorium. It is full of natural light with a row of desks for the scribal team. In the back are a kitchen and the space where Sally works. There is also a little room where visitors can stay.

Across from the Schoolroom stands the Black Iron Shed, built, as its name implies, of corrugated metal. It serves as a storage area. In one corner of the shed, there is a small electric griddle, filled with sand: a place to cure quills. Across the lawn, the New Shed serves as a place to prepare vellum skins for writing.

The Hendre Hall was originally part of the Rolls estate-that’s the Rolls as in Rolls Royce. In the old paternalistic days of large estates, the building had been built to serve as the village hall. The people of the village lived in houses belonging to the estate. In the 1970s, before they bought and converted it, Donald and Mabel remember going to the Hall for village events, for fetes and pantomimes. When the estate was still thriving, the outbuilding across the yard had served as sheds for mechanics who tinkered with cars. This old paternalistic world has now passed away and the estate has been broken up and sold off.

 

The Hendre Hall is a huge Tudor revival style building. The main space-the Hall itself-has been transformed into a large and comfortable living room. All around there remains evidence of the communal life the The Hendre Hall had once hosted. Huge wooden rafters in dark wood support the tall ceiling. Small heraldic shields are carved into the

woodwork. At one end there is a large raised platform to serve as a stage. All around are large windows which admit the constantly changing sunlight. The stair rails are worn smooth by decades of hands, coming and going to village events. In its present incarnation the room is filled with couches, tables and comfortable chairs. It is a lush environment and I wanted to wander through and look at all the collections which were displayed on every surface. A set of old inkpots in cut glass caught my eye; but it was time to put down my bags in my upstairs room and head over to see The Saint John’s Bible in the making.

I walked into the Schoolroom, where I found two scribes writing at their desks. The room was hushed, filled with that silence which comes of people sitting together in total concentration. Over the shoulders of the calligraphers, I could just glimpse fine columns of beautiful writing, even and clear and black against the off-white vellum.

Donald beckoned silently to me to follow him over to the New Shed, where Sally was preparing a vellum skin. It’s messy work. The skins have to be sanded with several grades of sandpaper and the dust gets everywhere. Sally wore work gloves and a mask as she labored over a large calfskin. Donald’s brother, who is a furniture maker, was jury-rigging a fan device to catch the flying dust. We stopped the fan.

“What do you call this process?” I asked.

“It’s called ‘scrutching,”‘ came the answer, and they all laughed. “Scrutching”* will not be found in any dictionary, but it is a perfect word to describe the scratchy, sweaty job.

Donald’s eye suddenly shifted to the skin Sally was preparing. Chatting amiably one moment, he stopped. There was something amiss about the skin on the table. Sally stood aside as he picked it up.

“I think a hole is developing in the skin,” he said.

He picked up the skin, running his large hands across the surface.

“Yes, I think there must have been a particle of dust underneath; there’s a small flaw. You’ll have to be careful of that spot.”

He looked at the surface of the formica table on which Sally was working. A fine layer of dust had accumulated on the tabletop. Perhaps indeed a small lump of vellum dust had sat under the surface and the sanding had thinned the skin just a bit too much.

“Every skin is just a bit different,” Donald said. “It’s a living thing. It’s not like this table top.” He tapped the formica surface. “This is the kind of perfection we’re used to, mechanical, cold, flawless.” He continued drumming his fingers along the tabletop. “We can’t achieve that here. It’s not what we’re about.”

“Perfection is not an option,” Sally said and everyone laughed. This had become their watchword. The perfection of the craftsman is something we’re not used to anymore, living in a formica world.

The Bible is being written in the ancient manner on calf skins. These come to The Hendre uncut: large, flat skins with rough edges. They never sit perfectly flat, but always retain just a bit of flexibility. Part of Sally’s job is to select a skin for each folio of the book. All of the skins are of the highest quality available, smooth, off-white and without blemishes, holes or markings. The thickness of the vellum can vary, both between skins and even within each skin.

 

Sally selects thicker skins to take large illuminations; the thicker skins are more stable and able to withstand paint and gilding better. Each skin has to be sanded to raise the fiber a bit, giving the skin a soft, almost velvety nap. This gives the scribe a surface with some ‘tooth’ to aid the writing. Areas which will be illuminated need less of this nap and are sanded more delicately.

Unlike a printed book in which a kind of slick perfection is sought after, a manuscript begins with a material which is organic, variable and has a life of its own. Over time, once The Saint John’s Bible is bound, the vellum pages will slowly mold to each other, creating a gently undulating regularity. Making the Bible is more like gardening than engineering; it is about working with materials which have personalities of their own. Donald’s task is to work with these natural materials, to make them work in harmony, just as he has to pull his team of scribes into a kind of harmony.

At lunchtime I went up to the Hall to eat with Donald and the family while the scribal team ate down at the Schoolroom. The kitchen at the Hall, like the living room, is filled with objects. His daughter Carmen has painted an inscription along top of the walls in an art nouveau style listing various English foods. Mabel laid out a simple lunch of soup and bread and cheese. It felt very-as the English would say-homely. As we chatted over lunch, I could sense how special this place was. There are not many households like this one anymore, in which work and family, labor and meals hold together as an organic whole.

 

Creating a contemporary Scriptorium

 

After lunch, I asked Donald to tell me more about the work with his scribal team. His cheeks puffed slightly as he let out a long, steady stream of air.

“The thing is,” he explained to me, “calligraphers aren’t trained for this kind of work.

Who are the great calligraphers? Thomas Ingmire, Denis Brown. Great personalities, unique personalities. But here on this project I want people to understand, ‘It is not my idiosyncrasies which are valued, but my consistency and the group harmonic.”‘

Donald compared the task at hand to the work of professional musicians. If you are hired to be part of a band, you know how to pick up your instrument and join in. You adjust to the rhythms of the group and you’re ready to play on an afternoon’s notice.

Calligraphers by contrast usually work by themselves. Their training is often based on a careful, detailed analysis of the letterforms they are trying to use. This leads to a great deal of examination of pen angle, the width of the strokes, the shapes of the arches and all the minutiae which make up a well thought through calligraphic script.

“I am also looking for a team which can be responsive to me. They need to show a willingness to empty themselves, so I can take them where we need to go together.”

Donald turned to the working habits he wanted people to develop in the Scriptorium. “All movements have to be efficient. I watched some of them at the beginning. They put

their ink over there,” he said, gesturing to his left. “Then they would pick up their pen and brush, lean over to put the brush in the ink, readjust themselves in front of their writing, load their pen and then begin to write.” His body became more and more contorted as he acted this out; his back and shoulders swayed back and forth as he mimed this complicated set of movements.

“That’s three or four steps before you even begin writing. Instead, I asked them to put their ink right near by where they could dip the pen in a single gesture and carry on writing.”

 

I had seen the arrangement he’d made for himself at one of the desks. It was a small chair with two cardboard boxes, one duct-taped to the seat and the other to the back of the chair. Elegant it was not; but it was very, very practical. There is another kind of elegance which comes of a craftsman setting up an efficient workspace. It was sturdy and it held everything he needed to write with. Everything was within arm’s reach, without the writer having to move from a writing position.

Donald turned to the attitudinal shift he was trying to develop in his team.

“I’m looking for a deeper perfection. Not superficial perfection. They have to let go of what makes them feel safe,” Donald said. We were back to the subject he’d mentioned while drumming on the formica table in the New Shed. The fact is we are so used to mechanical perfection, the flawless regularity of the machine age, that we have to reaccustom ourselves to working in a pre-industrial manner.

“I would watch people go back into an analytical mode. It’s just not appropriate here,” Donald said. The analytical approach in which most English calligraphers are trained has a lot to do with trying to achieve a mechanical kind of perfection.

Donald continued, “The problem is, you can’t sustain the analytical approach over time.

When you have a whole page to write, you can’t continue analyzing what you’re doing. Sometimes the vellum skins are dodgy; they have rough parts and smooth parts, and you just have to keep going.”

One of the problems in setting up this Scriptorium is that there isn’t a large pool of people to draw from. This has a lot to do with the difficulty of earning a living at calligraphy. Without a large, sustainable market for the work, people aren’t used to functioning in this kind of sustained way. Donald is· one of the few scribes who have pushed their craft far enough­ and who have brought enough business sawy to the enterprise-to be able to make a career of it.

“Calligraphers simply aren’t paid enough for what they do,” he said. He was right. The average calligrapher barely makes a living at professional lettering. It is often treated as a passionate vocation rather than as a profession.

Donald continued, “As a result, it’s very hard for most calligraphers to sit down and turn out the work.” They are used to taking a long time over projects, doing it as much for the love of the craft as for any hope of being paid for it. Calligraphers on the whole work alone in a studio at home. This makes it particularly hard for them to come in and immediately slip into the collective work of a major Scriptorium. The Saint John’s Bible demands a kind of collaborative effort which just doesn’t happen elsewhere.

I wandered back down to the Schoolroom. Chattering came from the back kitchen, where the scribes were taking a break with Olivia Edwards who was the office manager at the time. Sally made me a cup of tea and I sat down at the table. Sue Hufton, one of the scribes, plopped a bag of dried figs onto the table along with a bag of dried sunflower seeds. A box of liquorice Allsorts appeared and made the rounds. Brian Simpson, the other scribe, joined us. The room was full of happy energy, a well-earned break from the intense concentration of several hours of writing.

“How’s it been going?” I asked.

“It’s not perfect, but we just have to keep going,” Sue said.

Olivia from the office added, “I think we all have to. I hit a moment about two weeks ago when I really needed reassurance.”

 

“I know,” said Sally. “I just felt totally useless.”

“Well, I’m the only one who is totally useless!” Brian chimed in and everyone laughed. Brian is much older than the rest of the team and brings a lifetime of craftsmanship and good sense to the job. He often drops the right remark into a conversation to lighten the tone and set people at ease.

We began to talk about how the work had progressed.

Sue said, “It’s not easy to be put back into a student role when you’ve been working for a long time. I noticed when we got here that Donald slipped automatically into the teacher mode, and I think some of us had a hard time with that; but we had to be receptive to Donald and what he was doing.”

Originally all the scribes were to have been given a sample of the script to look at before they arrived. Ten days before the team arrived at The Hendre everyone had been given a paragraph of writing to study but Donald had said, “This isn’t resolved. It’s not an exemplar.” Donald had been designing the script as he went along; it is not fixed, but evolving. This fluidity in the script had given a lot of the team a hard time.

“But Donald is very forgiving of mistakes. He gave each of us a lot of rope; but he also always left the door open,” Sue commented.

When the team had arrived to begin its training, some of the scribes had tried to analyze the hand, but it was inconsistent. The writing varied, with different shapes of arches, different strokes at the end of the letters, and all sorts of variants. I could see on a table the study sheets he had worked out with them. They were a mass of small fragments of letters, mere notations of a living practice of writing.

And yet, looking at sample pages Donald had written, I saw the texture of the script was remarkably even, yet the writing remained incredibly alive, fluent and spontaneous. I could see how hard it would be for the calligraphers on the team to capture this spirit. Learning to write in this way was about learning to follow Donald’s adage: “Thinking doesn’t happen from the neck up.” I remembered what he had said to me: “It’s not about pen angle, nib width or the structure of arches. It’s about achieving a certain feeling.” In a lively mixed metaphor, he said, “In a hundred years, when they look at the manuscript, it’s the feeling they’re going to hear.”

That night Donald and Mabel took everyone out to the pub for dinner. The name of the local pub is “The Halfway House,” which sounds rather dire, until you realize that it is halfway between Monmouth and Abergavenny. We gathered around the log fire and had drinks before dinner. We sat down to a simple and hearty mea, and talked about everything but the Bible.

Perfection is not an option

 

The next morning, I wandered around the Schoolroom as everyone worked, watching the scribes writing, examining the finished pages and reading through some of the theological briefs for the illuminations prepared by the Committee on Illumination and Text at Saint John’s. Glancing up from these, I saw that each person sitting at the desk had their own body language. Brian sat absolutely still, perfectly calm, with a relaxed but concentrated expression on his face. Sue looked serious, deeply pensive and her body seemed ever so slightly tense as she wrote. And Donald-how can I describe it?-although he was sitting in the same position as the others, his eyes intent on his work, he exuded a physicality I didn’t sense in the others. His large hands seemed to caress the vellum. From time to time he would stop and run

 

his hands across the skin. I could see, looking at him, that he wasn’t thinking “from the neck up.” Years ago, he described to me writing with a quill on vellum as having the feeling of “running the flat of your fingernail softly down a baby’s back.” And here he was, doing just that-gently working the quill across the skin with enormous control and equal vitality, bringing this Bible to birth.

Not wanting to disturb the work which was going on, I sat down in the kitchen of the Schoolroom, made myself a cup of tea, and spent some time looking at the computer layout pages and the theological briefs which set out themes for the illuminations. The computer printouts were interesting. Most calligraphic books in this day and age are fairly simple affairs, and once the basic formats have been determined, the writing can be done without further planning. In the case of The Saint John’s Bible, because it is such a huge undertaking, the layout for every page has to be determined before any writing can take place.

One reason for this careful formatting is the set of exacting requirements demanded by the committee which holds the copyright of the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). They set stringent guidelines for layout which have to be respected, even in this unique hand-made book. Formats need to be prepared and proofread to make sure all the NRSV requirements have been met on each page.

There is another reason formatting has to be done first on the computer. In order to parcel out pages to individual scribes on the team, the text has to be fixed, down to each line break. This also allows pages to be written out of sequence. Once the team had mastered the script, they would begin taking pages home with them; the bulk of the writing would be done on their own and they would return at intervals to compare and examine their work and to pick up fresh sheets of vellum. The layout had to be completely fixed beforehand.

“Vin” Godier is the computer expert who produces the layout pages. He uses a Sanvito, a multiple master typeface, which very closely approximates the spacing of the manuscript hand. Twenty-first century technology serves the ancient art of writing by hand.

So I settled in to look at these computer printouts, comparing them to finished pages of the book. As I sat there over my cup of tea, Sally and Donald quietly came into the room and went over to Sally’s desk. They put a page of the manuscript onto the desk, and began discussing what they saw. They talked in hushed tones for about half an hour before I noticed something was amiss.

“That’s right,” Sally said.

“Yes, but this is about a centimeter out of line,” replied Donald.

Sally frowned without saying a word. Donald was very calm but it was clear something had gone wrong. I watched from the kitchen table, not wanting to interrupt. I slowly realized that Donald had written a whole page, only to have Sally discover that she had ruled the columns ever so slightly off square. The lines themselves were perfectly square and true. But the columns, which are long, weren’t quite at ninety degree angles to the straight lines of writing. The cumulative mistake meant that while the columns lined up at the top, they were five to ten millimeters from where they should be at the bottom. Visually, this was so minor that it was hardly noticeable, except that the pages had to be ruled up on the opposite side. Vellum being slightly translucent, any writing shows through slightly; this would highlight the fact that columns on either side of this sheet didn’t line up properly

Because vellum is a natural material, it never sits completely flat. Any turning of the page means it settles on the desk differently. Ruling up such a supple material is almost as

 

subtle and difficult as ruling up a piece of fabric-it just doesn’t stay still. Moisture also affects the skins, which swell and stretch in high humidity and shrink in dry weather. Even if a skin were perfectly ruled one day, by the next it might have slightly moved.

Sue came in after a while and pointed out that, having spent the better part of an hour and a half discussing the problem, perhaps it would be better just to re-rule a sheet and do the page over. I noticed no one took her up on this offer. After a bit Donald went back up to the main house. He wasn’t angry; he knew this was simply part of the learning curve.

Sue might have repeated the mantra “Perfection is not an option,” but probably thought better of it under the circumstances.

Sally came over to the table, clearly not pleased with what had happened.

“I suppose it was good that it happened to one of Donald’s sheets rather than to Sue or Brian. That would have been worse,” I said.

“You’re telling me,” Sally answered, as she reached for a rice cake. She munched on it silently as the rest of us chatted about other things.

Later at lunchtime, Sally waited for Sue and Brian to be out of the room and she went from desk to desk, measuring the line ruling on everyone’s pages. There were slight variations in their columns, but none were as far out of square as those on the page Donald had finished. Sally’s relief was palpable as it was she who was responsible for the ruling up of all the pages.

Treasures

Later that afternoon, I asked to talk with Donald about the tools and materials he was using. I had seen the skins, but I was curious about the quills and the inks. In particular I was curious about the precious ink sticks with their fine gold Chinese writing stamped on them.

Donald unwrapped a clean, black stick of ink. These needed to be ground in water in a slate inkstone to make each day’s portion of writing ink. Donald had more than one hundred of these, from a shop in Camden Town, London, called Roberson’s.

Donald told me, “Roberson’s were old-fashioned artist’s colormen whose shop had been open since 1810. They supplied famous Victorian artists like Lord Leighton (the academic painter). In fact Lord Leighton’s palette, which he had signed and given to the shop, still hung over the counter.”

When Donald shopped there in the sixties and seventies, the proprietor was already old.

The sticks had been brought over from China by sail with shipments of tea in the time of his father. Donald bought a large supply of ink sticks at two shillings apiece.

Once the project was underway, it became clear there would not be enough ink sticks to complete all seven volumes. Donald had some research done. They turned out to be extremely valuable collectors’ items. There was no way they could afford to buy more.

During one of Sally Mae’s Bible presentations, she showed a picture of the stick ink and talked about its unique qualities and the problems of supply. From the back of the room a voice spoke up “I think I have some of those sticks.” It was the voice of a calligrapher who had worked with Donald some years before. He had given her a quantity of the sticks but she had never used them. So she donated them to the project.

Later two other calligraphers to whom Donald had given ink sticks donated theirs as well. Those sticks sat in drawers around the world waiting to come home to complete The Saint John’s Bible-a valuable gift to the project.

 

The vermilion Donald uses comes from another artist’s supplier. The firm which manufactured the vermilion cakes closed in 1867, and the shopkeeper who had this rare supply was wary of parting with too many at a time.

“I used to go in and buy just enough not to arouse his suspicion. Then I’d send one of my friends in to buy some. But then you had to wait a decent time before going in again, or he would refuse to sell you any.” Eventually, when the shop was to close, Donald offered to buy the lot at seven-and-six per cake (which is seven shillings, sixpence in the predecimal English coin) and was refused. After the shop closed Donald tracked down the whereabouts of the remaining stock to find that the old man had been hoarding over two-thousand cakes of the precious color and he was able to buy the lot for a fraction of the original cost.

These cakes were exquisite. Brilliantly red-orange, they were pressed into molds and were as clean and shiny as mint coins. Each was carefully wrapped in paper. Donald has enough in reserve to last him the remainder of his professional life.

 

Breaking the tension

 

Brian and Sue went home in mid-afternoon on Friday. They would return the following Monday to continue work. The last event of my visit was the Friday afternoon planning meeting with Olivia, Sally and Donald.

As we settled into comfortable chairs in The Hendre Hall, everyone was relaxed and there was a lot of laughter in the room. Olivia led the meeting, raising the various subjects for discussion and decision. There were many logistical issues to resolve. Donald was preparing to go to America for a major promotional tour-how was he going to balance that with the need to spend time working on the project itself? They discussed ways to handle the film crew which was about to descend on them to shoot a documentary.

As they worked out a plan for the American tour, they also discussed the progress report they would file with Saint John’s that afternoon.

The conversation began to wander from the agenda. Someone mentioned that the illumination of the Baptism of Christ included a full-length portrait of John the Baptist-how would Donald handle the image, they wondered?

“I bet he was thin,” someone said. “He was probably in pretty good shape, with his healthy, outdoor lifestyle.”

Someone else pointed out that his hair shirt was probably a rather slinky number. This idea of John the Baptist as a New Testament Leonardo DiCaprio set Olivia and Sally off and everyone laughed. It was good for them to break the tension of the morning and put the problem of the slightly skewed columns behind them.

In the two days I spent at The Hendre, Donald introduced me to a community of people who were being molded into a team to produce a work of great craftsmanship. They are using all the resources available to make something which is grounded in the ancient tradition of calligraphy, yet which is also entirely up-to-date. There’s nothing at all nostalgic about it-it’s hard work, with production schedules, computers, visiting television crews and tight deadlines. And yet it is also a place where they are rediscovering the techniques of the medieval Scriptorium. It is a place of quills, vellum, rare vermilion and hundred-year-old sticks of ink.

What better setting could there be to create a twenty-first century, living Bible?