RARE FIRST EDITION KING JAMES BIBLE DISCOVERED: At Drew University in New Jersey. Nothing’s more lost than something misfiled or, in this case, mis-catalogued. From the NYT report:

Brian Shetler, a doctoral candidate in book history who works in the library, discovered the Bible when he was hunting through the rare-book shelves, pulling a sampling of 17th-century books printed in England to show to a history class. It was in a box with a label mentioning “Bible,” “1611” and “R. Barker,” a seeming reference to the London printer Robert Barker.

“I just thought, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’” Mr. Shetler said. “I knew Barker had published the King James Bible, but I thought there was no way we would have one and not know about it.”…

Material in the library’s archives indicate that the volume, which was listed in a 1950 card catalog but not in the digital catalog, was exhibited at the library in 1935 and again in 1977.

Reminds me of when economist Alan Krueger sent a grad student to the Princeton library to look something up in The Wealth of Nations and she discovered that the university owned a copy that had belonged to George Washington–thereby demonstrating that Washington had in fact owned, and presumably read, the book.