The children’s Bible market has a giant gap

Back from maternity leave, plus: creating identities, art I want, and more

Good morning! I’m returning from maternity leave, and it’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you.

But first, a personal note: Thanks for sticking around in my absence! The baby is thriving—already sleeping as long as seven hours—and we’re settling into a decent routine. I’m getting back into the swing of things and intend to return to regularly posting here. I’ll let you know if that changes.

Also, to paying subscribers: I haven’t resumed billing yet and won’t for at least another week while I make sure the weekly publishing schedule is still viable for me.

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1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere

The children’s Bible market has a giant gap

(via)

This is much less newsy than most of what I write here, but it’s something I’ve been researching while on leave, so I’ve decided to vent my spleen.

Here’s the context: Our twins are 4, and they love books. They’re currently big fans of the Tales that Tell the Truth series, having decided the stories in the Jesus Storybook Bible and the Big Bible Storybook series are too short.

I don’t want to get another children’s retelling for two reasons:

1) Frankly, I don’t want to have to read through the whole thing to screen for weird theology and errors, and children’s Bibles are notorious for having both. (Here’s an interesting podcast episode on the topic.) I’ve already thrown one kids’ Bible into the garbage because it described Eve in Eden as “silly.” (There were other problems with it, too, including bad art. Naturally, it has over 11,000 favorable reviews on Amazon.)

But 2), I think the twins have—or very soon will have—the attention span to handle the Bible itself. Not a retold children’s product, not a standalone story, but the real thing in a reasonably accessible translation. Still, they do need pictures.

And that’s the problem: The product I want doesn’t seem to exist.

I’ve done a lot of googling, browsed the catalogs of Christian publishing houses, and even asked Byron Borger at Hearts & Minds Bookstore if he knows of something I’m missing, because his knowledge of the current Christian book market is encyclopedic.

One of the Bibles which Byron suggested is apparently the closest thing on offer to what I want: The ESV Children’s Bible (Keepsake Edition) has “more than 200” illustrations, the largest number I’ve seen in a standard translation. But the Bible is a big book. This edition has nearly 1,400 pages, so at best we can expect an average of one picture every seven pages. It’s not enough for 4-year-olds.

Now, I realize my ideal—a full-page picture every 30 verses or so—would make for an enormous volume. Probably multiple volumes. With that in mind, I’d be very happy with just a handful of books illustrated this way. Realistically, I’m not going to get through the whole Bible with them before they learn how to read (nor am I going to read, say, Judges 19 to 4-year-olds), so a smaller section would be perfect.

Start with Luke-Acts. At a 30:1 verse:picture ratio, it’d need around 70 illustrations, so roughly 140 pages for the whole book. That seems doable! But it doesn’t appear to exist, nor does anything similar. I think this is a real market gap, so Christian publishers with Bible translation rights, if you want me to spearhead a project to get this made, consider this my proposal. Hit me up!

N.b. I cannot draw.

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2. What I'm reading this next week

Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, by Tara Isabella Burton (2023)

This week I’m actually reading Sohrab Ahmari’s forthcoming Tyranny, Inc., for reviewing purposes. But next on my list, for my own interest, is Tara Isabella Burton’s latest. My husband and the baby and I went to her launch party in Washington last week, and after hearing her talk, I’m excited to get into the book itself.

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3. A recommendation

Staying off the news cycle when you’re busy with a new baby! I barely know what happened in the last two months, and it’s great. I’m still deluding myself that I’m not going to get on Twitter much even now that I’m back to work.

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4. Recent work

I had a decent reserve of Christianity Today columns set to publish while I was out on leave, so here’s everything that’s run there and elsewhere since my last email:

• Ron DeSantis’s campaign Christianity | Christianity Today

• The spiritual battle of teen screen time | Christianity Today

• Left behind at the ballot box | Christianity Today

• Can the United States be ‘forgiven our debts’? | Christianity Today

• Republicans need to accept Trump is clearly guilty | The Daily Beast

• The lesson of the Wagner coup | Defense Priorities (newsletter)

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5. Miscellaneous

Some art I want! This is “Cesano 22,” by Sarah Mari Shaboyan, and I want to get a print. I also really like her “Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute,” “Summer Chaos,” and the Red Triptych series. But, alas, I just bought a Linden Frederick print I’ve been wanting for years, so I have to wait a bit before another acquisition.

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