PLAINSONG PRESS
A reader’s edition of the Berean Standard Bible. One column. No notes, no headings, no cross-references — only the text, set to be read the way you read any other book. Verse numbers stand in the margin, out of the line of reading.
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Now in proof.
The Quire is typeset and being proofread. The first printing is planned through Kickstarter.
All sixty-six books in proof
The whole Bible has been typeset and is being checked page by page against the source text.
The website is live
Plainsong Press now has a home online. News of The Quire will be posted here as the work goes on.
Kickstarter
The first printing will be funded through Kickstarter. Use the button above to hear the day it opens.
What is a quire?
Before a book is bound, it is folded. Sheets are folded in half and nested one inside another, then sewn together through the fold. That gathering is a quire.
The word comes from the Latin quaterni, “sets of four,” by way of Old French, because medieval scribes most often built their gatherings from four folded sheets: eight leaves, sixteen pages. A book was a stack of quires sewn one to the next, and a well-bound book is still made the same way. The Quire is Smyth-sewn: gathered in signatures and stitched through the fold, so it opens flat and lasts.
The word has a second life. In the Book of Common Prayer, “quire” is also how choir is spelled: “In Quires and Places where they sing.” For a press named for plainsong, the double meaning is a gift.
The book at its plainest
A quire is the smallest whole unit of a book: leaves, folded and sewn, before anything else is added. The name says what this edition sets out to be.
Most Bibles are built for study. Section headings, footnotes and cross-references stand between the reader and the text, and they cut it into pieces meant to be looked up rather than read. The Quire takes them away. What is left is the Berean Standard Bible, set verbatim in a single column, on a page made for reading at length — a chapter at a sitting, or a whole book.
It keeps only what you need to find your place: a running head, a verse number in the margin, a capital at each chapter’s opening. Everything the editors added prints in navy, so the words of scripture are always the black on the page.
The Quire is the first edition from Plainsong Press.
The text is the melody.
Plainsong is the cantus firmus — the given melody every other voice is composed against.
Scripture has one. From the promise in the garden to the Lamb on the throne, the story of Christ and the salvation He brings runs beneath every book — the one melody the whole canon sings.
“And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He explained to them what was written in all the Scriptures about Himself.”
LUKE 24:27
That is how this press makes Bibles. The text carries the melody, so it is fixed and set verbatim; whatever an edition adds is counterpoint over it, and never louder.
The whole text
All sixty-six books of the Berean Standard Bible, from the current text: the third printing, 2025. Set verbatim and checked against the source word by word.
Numbers in the margin
Verse numbers hang in the outer margin, so you can find your place without the line being broken to show it.
Poetry as poetry
Psalms and prophets keep the translators’ own line breaks. Where the Hebrew is an acrostic, the letters are supplied.
Two inks
Black for the scripture. Navy for everything the editors added — heads, numbers, capitals, and the ornament that closes each book.