In the Dark

I couldn’t resist sharing the following, which I found here.

One day Lord Byron gave his publisher, John Murray, a handsomely bound Bible, its cover graced with a flattering inscription. Murray proudly displayed the book on a table where it would be seen by his many guests.

One day a visitor, admiring the book, noticed that at John 18:40, in the line ‘Now Barabbas was a robber,’ Byron had crossed out the word ‘robber’ and substituted… ‘publisher’.

You can probably figure out why I found it amusing!

The post from which I got the quote cites anecdotage.com as the source, but other websites dispute the attribution to Bryon. The Oxford Book of Essential Quotations, for example, gives:

Now Barabbas was a publisher.
 
also attributed, wrongly, to Byron

Thomas Campbell 1777–1844 Scottish poet: attributed, in Samuel Smiles A Publisher and his Friends: Memoir and Correspondence of the late John Murray (1891) vol. 1, ch. 14; see Bible

This goes to show two things: one is that not everything you find on the internet is true; the other is that very often the things that aren’t true really should be.

P.S. Fans of the classic TV series Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy will no doubt remember in Episode 1 that George Smiley uses the variation “Barabbas was a bookseller” when he is making a purchase in an antiquarian bookshop before he notices that he is being followed by Peter Guillam…

This entry was posted on August 17, 2024 at 6:32 pm and is filed under Literature, Television with tags Barabbas, John Murray, Lord Byron, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.