3:16
Donald E. Knuth, noted scientist and award-winning author, culminates a life-long interest in Bible study, typography, and art with 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated. This book is a marriage of profound biblical insights and exquisite calligraphy -- a treat for the mind, the eyes, and the spirit. We are going to study 59 verses of the Bible, starting with Genesis 3:16 and ending with Revelation 3:16. Dr. Knuth knew that a large collection of information can be understood reasonably well by selecting random portions of data and studying them in depth. He decided to apply this principle to Bible study, believing that it might be an efficient and effective way to increase biblical understanding. Because of the great popularity of John 3:16, known to millions of people by its number, he focused on chapter 3, verse 16 of each book. The text found in position 3:16 of most books in the Bible is a typical verse with no special distinction. But when Knuth examined what leading scholars throughout the centuries have written about those verses, he found that there is a fascinating story to be learned in every case, full of historical and spiritual insights. Even "ordinary" Bible verses turn out to be extraordinary. He also decided that a book about the Bible should be beautiful. So he and the twentieth century's leading designer of typefaces, Hermann Zapf, commissioned 60 illustrations from outstanding calligraphers in 26 different countries.
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- My favorite book from Knuth isn't computer-related at all.
3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated
https://smile.amazon.com/3-16-Bible-Texts-Illuminated/dp/089...
- Donald Knuth used a pre-release version of Photoshop (at Adobe headquarters after the employees had gone home for the day) to process the images for his book 3:16. He was using multiple Macs to parallelize his process, and there were frequent crashes. This was back in the days of Macs with 512K of RAM which makes your 128MB Mac seem positively capacious by comparison.
- It’s kind of interesting to note that Adobe predates the Mac. An interesting bit of Adobe pre-history was that Donald Knuth used a pre-release version of PhotoShop at Adobe headquarters when he was putting together his book 3:16. He had it running on multiple Macs each processing a different scanned calligraphic rendering of a verse because the size of the image files was such that processing was painfully slow.
One interesting bit was on one of the scans, he changed a line break to more accurately reflect the sense of the text that was rendered. After the first edition went to press, he discovered that the calligrapher had rendered a Russian cross in the negative space¹ and his modification had obliterated this. Later editions made some other changes to line breaks to restore the Russian cross.
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1. This account is from my potentially inaccurate recollection of Knuth’s talk at the 1994 ATypI conference in San Francisco. It might have been a cross of Lorraine and it might have been the words that formed the cross and not the negative space.
- > You can safely ignore it, the document is just a summary of Knuth's book.
Knuth is a Lutheran, by the way (uh-oh). He even wrote 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated[1].
[1] https://www.amazon.com/3-16-Bible-Texts-Illuminated/dp/08957...
