Number two of twenty-five copies on Oxford India Paper, printed in Oxford by the University Press; with 428 pages, two volumes in one. Bound in red levant goatskin with cream inlay, tooled in gold and black; all edges gilt.

For Queen Elizabeth II's Coronation in 1953, Oxford University Press was commissioned to print the Bible required in the ceremony. A limited edition of twenty-five copies on fine paper was produced, of which two were specially bound. The first was used in the Coronation when the Archbishop of Canterbury administered the oath. The Queen, kneeling on the altar steps, laid her right hand on the Bible saying: 'The things which I have here before promised, I will perform and keep. So help me God.' After kissing the Bible, she signed the oath. The Bible was then formally presented to her, in a ceremony dating from the coronation of William and Mary in 1689. In 1953 for the first time it was presented jointly by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. The Bible was subsequently placed in the library at Lambeth Palace.

The second copy of the Bible, shown here, was identically bound. The firm of Sangorski & Sutcliffe executed both bindings to designs by Lynton Lamb (1907-77), graphic designer with Oxford University Press from 1930; he had studied bookbinding under Douglas Cockerell at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. The design 'grows' out of the spine structure, the raised bands of the spine leading to gold-tooled music staves. They are complemented by staves in black, and a restrained pattern of ER cyphers and crowns, around the central lozenge of the Royal Arms, perhaps a visual representation of the solemn music and ritual around the monarch as the central figure of the ceremony.

Catalogue entry ameded from Royal Treasures, A Golden Jubilee Celebration, London 2002.