Breviary called "The Normal One"?

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I was talking with a priest who was ordained right around Vatican II ended, and he mentioned to me there used to be a one volume Breviary/Divine Office. I forget if he said if it was in English, but he said something along the lines that the title literally meant “The Normal One” or something to that extent. I believe he said this was printed after Vatican II.

Anyhow, just curious if anyone know what book this might be? I love to collect old book and I would like to st art collecting some of the breviaries that were used in the 20th century before the LOTH that we use now.

Also, does anyone have a good source for locating older & used 4 volume sets of the Liturgy of the Hours? I have one for home, but I would like to have a second one for work. I tried to purchase a used one from online sources, but most of these are new and finding one that is used (and broken in… nice and flexible) seems to be hard. Most of the sellers have really nice copies, and I don’t mind getting one that is not as nice (so long as it has a cover and all pages) to use as a spare.
 
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KD8TZC said:
I was talking with a priest who was ordained right around Vatican II ended, and he mentioned to me there used to be a one volume Breviary/Divine Office. I forget if he said if it was in English, but he said something along the lines that the title literally meant “The Normal One” or something to that extent. I believe he said this was printed after Vatican II.
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You might look around on ebay. I believe I’ve seen what looked like (and this is my phrasing) an “interim” LOH; used between Vatican II and the approval of our current version. I’m sorry, I don’t remember what it was called. But it wasn’t just once, it seemed to turn up pretty regularly.
 
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Well the LOTH was not promulgated until 1970. So necessarily he would have been using the pre-Conciliar breviary until then, unless he was involved in evaluating the many experimental breviaries that were produced by the council drafting the new breviary. The old one was meant to be prayed in Latin only, but again a lot of experimentation went on back then so there might have been some license to pray in English on an experimental basis.

I have a French one-volume pre-1970 (but post Vatican II) copy of Prière du temps présent (the French equivalent of Christian Prayer), that is pretty close to the final form of the LOTH but uses an older experimental translation. I also have the final version of PTP that is the current LOTH, plus the French 4 volume set, plus monastic pre- and post-council in original schema A and another in Schema B, and the list goes on…

I would say “normal” would depend highly on what community you were associated with as what’s “normal” to a Benedictine would be very foreign to a diocesan priest!
 
I don’t have much to contribute, but perhaps “the normal one” is an unusual translation of “editio typica”. It might help you narrow your search.
 
That’s actually an excellent point.

The other thing that would help is timeline, i.e. before or after 1970.
 
Well, he was ordained in 1967 I believe. The “editio typica” may be what he was talking about. Does anyone have any more information on that? Was that a one volume book?

He was not part of an order as he was ordained as a diocesan priest.
 
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