A Word on English Printings of Calvin’s Commentaries

By the mid-nineteenth century Calvin’s commentaries had not been fully and freshly rendered into English for generations. The Calvin Translation Society was founded in Edinburgh in 1843 expressly to complete the work, and over the following dozen years it produced forty-five volumes of commentaries, three volumes of Tracts, and Henry Beveridge’s three-volume translation of the Institutes.

The resulting fifty-one-volume set became the standard Calvin — the edition on which many twentieth-century theologians were raised.

Nearly a century later the American publisher Eerdmans reprinted the set: the forty-five commentary volumes, the three volumes of Tracts, and the Institutes condensed from three volumes into two. Eerdmans also reissued other nineteenth-century Calvin translations the Society had not produced — among them Sermons on Job and Calvin’s Calvinism.

The volumes were bound in blue cloth over boards with matching gray dust jackets and sewn bindings. Those jackets were slight to begin with and grow brittle with age, so a complete run with jackets intact is hard to find. Nor were the volumes sold as a set — Eerdmans issued them over some twenty years, leaving a collector to assemble a complete set piece by piece.

In the 1980s Baker Book House issued a more accessible edition, condensing the forty-five volumes into twenty-two to take up less shelf space and lower the cost of printing. Baker has since reprinted and revamped it three times.

The first iteration was the best: it kept sewn bindings, in brown boards. The second was of lesser quality — glue-bound rather than sewn, so copies commonly fall apart when exposed to sunlight, heat, or humidity (none of them kind to a book in the first place). The third and most recent, produced for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, simply reproduced the previous set with different, commemorative boards.