A hand-copied Bible in (just over) a year

Canadian Hadley Burns spent 489 consecutive days transcribing the Bible by hand.

Burns, a self-proclaimed “book guy,” originally began his project with the goal of finishing it in five years but completed it well ahead of that schedule.

Burns's Bible contains 8,200 pages bound in 35 volumes

"I started off allowing myself an hour and a half to two hours a day," Burns says. "I thought it would take about five years. But I found as I got into it, it got exciting."

He had originally had the idea ten years before and tried to persuade his wife to undertake the task, as she had beautiful handwriting. Looking to create a family heirloom.

However, unable to persuade her to start, he took on the project for himself, and after a few false starts, got into his stride.

About 20 days into writing, he decided to add pictures wherever he saw fit, though, in the beginning, he was hesitant. “I resisted at first, but then I decided there are almost 2,000 versions of the Bible out there. A good number have pictures, so I began to put pictures in,” he said.

Burns would write for up to four hours per day.

Burns also became Irritated by a spacing issue he’d begun to correct, so he later went back and rewrote the first 600 pages before finishing.

His Process

Once he’d worked out the kinks, he would wake up daily at 5 am and spend up to four hours carefully writing out every single page of the king James Bible in sequence.

“I like writing. I like doing things with my hands, creating special things,” said Burns.

Sometimes, he wrote hundreds of pages for hours. One day, when he was ill, he wrote a single word just to keep up his streak.

Burns chose to write on loose-leaf parchment paper (a total of 8,200 pages) which he later had bound into 35 2-inch thick volumes. Using a total of over 200 black, ultra-fine fiber sharpie pens and drawing 53 illustrations.

It took 410 days to finish the Old Testament and an additional 79 to complete the New Testament, including copying out all of Jesus’ words in red lettering.

Although his effort attracted a lot of publicity in his hometown of Cambridge, Ontario, Burns doesn’t intend to sell his completed work.

"I'm going to keep it, display it and enjoy having created it and owning it," he says.

The Bible is annotated with 53 images.