A man went into a bookshop in central London. There was a woman, see, and he wanted to give her a special gift. Something beautiful, but subtle; spiritual, yet full of longing. He was looking for The Song of Solomon, those concertina-ed Old Testament verses whose lines make your soul leap and your heart beat fast.
"Behold, thou art fair, my love," or "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth; for thy love is better than wine." The man tried, the man failed - Solomon's song was not to be had in a well-made edition. The only way you could buy it was as part of a stentorian Bible compilation, the sort of volume which sends a wholly different message.
So he published it himself. Not immediately, but after three years plotting and planning with a friend from college days at Edinburgh University. Thus spakes Matt Darby about the origin of The Words of the Wise, a Pocket Canon of 12 books from the old and new testaments, eclectically introduced by writers from scientist Stephen Rose to novelists and critics A.S. Byatt, Will Self, Blake Morrison and Fay Weldon. The books are beautifully made, desirable as fetishes, covered with clean black-and-white images form photographic libraries such as Magnum.
"I'm curious about the Bible from so many aspects," Darby says. "The King James translation we've worked from has had such an effect on literature, even for people who are not particularly religious." He lives in Dublin now, from where he practises as a developer specialising in heritage buildings, currently the buildings and parklands of Ballynatray House in Waterford.
Whether you read it as faith, myth or simply some fine, fraught, writing, the Bible is a bedrock template for western culture, with a palpably different orientation to other ancient texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the I-Ching or the Bhagavad Gita. Small wonder its words are so passionately-contested. Some writers challenge its assumptions overtly, others such as A.S. Byatt in the Song of Solomon deal with its lyrical impulses as a kind of waterfall effect on Western language and literature.
A handful of Irish writers were approached, according to Darby, but apart from Seamus Heaney who was interested but not available in the time-frame, the response he got was "I've had that stuff rammed down my throat for years and I don't want to deal with it again."
Be that as it may, Bono has agreed to become an introducer in the next series, along with Ruth Rendell, Peter Ackroyd and Joanna Trollope. Toni Morrison and James Kelman are still thinking about it.
What strikes you about the first 12 "introducers" as Darby calls them, is how their widely-varied responses and styles are a curiosity in themselves. Some read as though they were written fast; others may have been, but greet the reader with a whole new context.
Part of that context is the whole genre of self-help books, now the fastest growing sector of the book industry with 1997 sales in the US leaping to more than 1.13 billion. Traditional Bible sales, including hymnals and prayer books, have fallen in the same period, but marketing prodigies like this pocket canon may start to change that trend. If it meets the test of relevance, resonance and contemporaneity, the Bible may become a must-have text for a new set of reasons.
Will Self's strong, idiosyncratic preface to the Book of Revelation places it in the neighbourhood of Nightmare on Elm Street: "I found it a sick text." He dedicates his piece to a dead friend who became psychotic, always mumbling the obsessive numerological coincidences of the Book as a clinical mantra in a world gone seriously weird.
This is Revelation as a fundamentalist Freddy, graduate of a preachers' college scorched with fire and brimstone who looks into the sky and sees, as Revelation puts it, "a woman sit upon a scaret-coloured beast . . . having seven heads and horns... having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication, and upon her forehead was a name written, `Mystery, Babylon the great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the Earth'.
Steven Rose, the geneticist, pursues the evolution of western "dichotomies" between mind and body, nature and culture, domination and self-agency in Genesis, a book he had not read until he was invited to introduce it for this series: "I preferred white coats to black hats," he explains.
Already, the Pocket Canon's lateral take on questions of relevance and reverence is annoying the hell out of fundamentalist Christians. Tony Bennett, an Essex-based solicitor, alleges blasphemy, asserting that not one fact in the Bible texts has ever been disproven, and that its prophecies score a "100 per cent" accuracy rate.
"It appears to have been deliberate editorial policy to seek anti-Christian and anti-Biblical views," he wrote on behalf of "a number of Christians" in a 16-page letter to Canongate Books, the imprint through which Darby publishes this series, along with old friend and publishing wunderkind Jamie Byng.
No writ has been served so far, but this opening slap on the knuckles raises the old chestnut of who owns the Bible's words, and who is entitled to mediate them. So far, the Bible is the battle ground of textual scholars, of linguists, of guardians of various Christian faiths, of liberal Christians who believe in a one-toone relationship with "the words of God", and of more conservative religious institutions such as the Roman Catholic church which prefer to interpose a layer of trained mediators between the community and the Bible's often ambiguous messages.
"I'd enjoy a good row about that," says Blake Morrison, who wrote the introduction to the Gospel of St John. Morrison was singled out for special mention in the letter, along with Self and Louis de Berniere. What interested him in the project was that "I thought it a rather brilliant publishing idea, and you don't find many in this business".
Morrison was steeped in the Bible while attending a Church of England school: the rigorous prose of the King James version greeted him at assembly each morning. He reckons he is among the last generation in England to have had that soundtrack accompany his childhood.
"It's partly the buzz of nostalgia that interested me," he explains. "But the texts are surprisingly immediate: you don't have to make a case for its relevance the way you do with classical texts. The stories are about themes we know - birth and death, murderous feelings, human suffering, even love, whether the love is sexual or, more often, divine."
The Words of the Wise, the Pocket Canons, authorised King James Version, (Canongate Books, £1 each, £14.99 for boxed set, in UK). To be published on October 15th. The following is a list of the books and the introducer to each: Genesis: Stephen Rose; Job: Louis de Bernieres; Song of Solomon: A.S. Byatt; Matthew: A.N. Wilson; Luke: Rt Rev Richard Holloway, Bishop of Edinburgh; Corinthians: Fay Weldon; Exodus: David Grossman; Proverbs: Charles Johnson; Ecclesiastes: Doris Lessing; Mark: Nick Cave; John: Blake Morrison; Revelation: Will Self.