The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments 2 vols.
Edinburgh: Printed by Richard Watkins, 1743. Contemporary
Scottish wheel binding in red morocco, gilt; leather library
label of James Balfour, 1747. The Bible in which the eighteenth-
century Scottish family kept its records was usually a folio-
sized book, and not suitable for taking to services on Sunday.
While it was not obligatory to do so, families often did. These
Bibles were frequently nicely bound. On display is a mid-
eighteenth century Bible with a rather simple Scottish wheel
binding. The fact that the tooling on the two volumes is
different, as are the ndpapers inside the volume, suggests that
this set probably belonged to a family of modest means, which
could only afford to have one volume bound at a time. That Burns
knew his Bible very well is evidenced in the number of
references there are to it in his poems; his correspondence,
too, is filled with references to and quotations from the Bible.
Because of poems such as "Holy Willie's pray