Bibles with ~2500 pages are published in the Protestant world all the time, and people buy and use them all the time. The NOAB is 2416 pages. The ESV Study Bible is 2720 pages. Heck, the Didache NABRE is 2506 pages. These Bibles might not be compact, but they are perfectly usable. They can easily travel in a car, backpack, messenger bag, or large purse. Three volumes the size of the ICSBNT can’t.
I am, frankly, sick of excuses from Catholic Bible publishers. It is absolutely possible to produce this Bible in a single-volume format. Cut the concordance and all other extraneous matter outside the book introductions, footnotes, and Biblical text, print it on thin paper, and it can be done. If it doesn’t happen, the only reason will be because Ignatius Press didn’t have the will.
These excuses are no different from the endless litany of excuses we hear all the time for the Catholic Bible publishing world. Ascension Press and Saint Benedict Press try to sell us $60-$70 Bibles with glued bindings. Baronius Press subbed in bonded leather for actual leather and no one batted an eye. The Oxford Catholic Study Bible settles for inconvenient articles at the front of the book rather than proper footnotes on the same page as the Biblical text, then has the gall to price a bonded leather edition at $95. No Catholic Bible publisher can be bothered to even try producing a truly premium Catholic Bible. Protestants wouldn’t put up with this for two seconds. If these were Protestant Bible publishers, they would fail miserably in the face of vastly superior competitors on all sides. But we Catholics just put up with it, because there is little competition and no incentive for the publishers to do better.
But those disappointments are minor compared to this one, because the ICSB really is the last hope we have for a proper Catholic study Bible for the average layman. The competitors are kind of a joke by comparison. No other Catholic study Bible has extensive, reasonably faithful footnotes throughout the Biblical text that cover the whole breadth of expected topics, textual, historical, and catechetical. If we had a single volume ICSB, it would be an easy recommendation for just about every English-speaking Catholic.
No one buys 3-volume Bibles. Only the sort of obsessive nerds who post in threads like this and check the Catholic Bible Talk blog every morning are ever going to bother. New converts want a Bible they can put in their backpack, not three giant hardcovers. Parents want a Bible they can give to their newly-confirmed kids, not a three-volume reference set. With a single-volume ICSB, this would be maybe the single most valuable Catholic Bible-related project of the past half-century. But with only a cumbersome 3-volume bookshelf set to show for it, this project is a disappointing footnote on Scott Hahn’s resume with no serious potential to have an impact on Catholic Biblical literacy.
I don’t care if they initially publish the Old Testament in two separate volumes. But if they don’t follow it up with a one-volume edition, that will be the most disappointing failure in modern Catholic Bible publishing history.
