Douay-Rheims Bible - Genuine Leather for Daily Prayer & Study

This edition of the Douay–Rheims is a facsimile reprint of the 1914 John Murphy edition, later republished with the same type by P. J. Kenedy & Sons. Though I have not had time yet to make my way through the entire Bible, the Scriptural text appears to be identical to the 1899 John Murphy edition that is circulating both online and in reprints by Baronius and Saint Benedict Press. The infamous error in Psalm 42 found in the 1899 edition that reads "Sent forth thy light and thy truth" is corrected in this edition to read "Send forth thy light and thy truth"; as an aside, that error is fixed in the Saint Benedict Press edition, but NOT in the Baronius (their justification appears to be that the text has been set to "faithfully reproduce" the 1899 text, even to the point of reproducing obvious errors).What sets the 1914 edition apart textually from the more widely-available 1899-based reprints of the Douay are the notes. Some explanation is in order: The 1899 edition uses a chronology by which the events in Scripture are given dates based on "young earth" creationism. Dates in the 1899 edition, especially in the Old Testament, are rendered with the notation "A.M." ("anno mundi" in Latin, that is, "age of the world"). Thus, the note for Genesis 1:1 in the 1899 edition and its reprints gives the year of creation as "A.M. 1", followed immediately with "Ante C." ("ante Christum", or "before Christ" [B.C.]) 4004, on the assumption that the ages of the patriarchs given in Genesis are literal references to their lifespans.The 1914 edition, in contrast, disposes of this system entirely in light of "recent discoveries in Bible lands and study of the Bible itself", as the Preface appended to the text reads. Rather than re-typesetting the 1899 edition from scratch, however, the editors of the 1914 edition simply omitted the notes that employed the A.M. system, replacing some of them with B.C. dates while leaving others out entirely. Thus, many of the notes found in the 1899 edition are nowhere to be found in this reprint. Additionally, some textual notes have, without explanation, been removed. The first instance I have discovered so far is the note for Genesis 1:26; in the 1899 edition, Challoner explains that the fact that God speaks in the plural ("Let us make man to our image") is Biblical evidence for the doctrine of the Trinity. In the 1914 edition, this sentence has been removed from the footnote for this verse, leaving two and a half lines of blank type where that sentence had been before. Likewise, the "Historical and Chronological Table" found at the end of the Bible has been rewritten entirely to align with the abandonment of the A.M. system.It is up to the purchaser to decide which version of the Douay he desires for his library. The 1899 version is more widely available, with the added benefit of newly-typeset editions containing clean, easy-to-read text. However, this 1914 edition is an inexpensive alternative, provided one is willing to tolerate less-than-perfect text from the facsimile process, as well as the variances in the references and footnotes I have highlighted above.EDIT: As I have perused this 1914 edition further, more and more notes from the 1899 edition are nowhere to be found, such as Challoner's explanation of the mark of Cain as a "trembling of the body" (Gen. 4:15) and the Hebrew tradition of Lamech slaying Cain (Gen. 4:23). Also, passages Challoner's notes originally identified in the Old Testament as typologies for Christ are no longer referenced, such as Simeon and Levi slaying a man as a type for Christ being slayed by the priests and scribes (Gen. 49:6). The Pentateuch, and Genesis especially, appear to be most affected by this approach. This suggests to me that the 1914 Douay was intended to be a transitional edition of the Catholic Bible in English, a placeholder to be made available until a full revision of the text could be carried out (as happened with the Confraternity New Testament and, subsequently, the New American Bible). Whether these changes are innocent or the result of "modernism" is for the individual purchaser to decide. Caveat emptor.