Henry Jones, of the Sequim Rotary Club, was a guest speaker at the Sequim Valley Lions Club meeting on Aug. 24.

The topic of discussion titled, “Over Six Billion Sold,” featured exhibits of rare and early edition Bibles taken from an extensive collection owned by Jones.

The photograph above shows Jones displaying one of his favorites, the Baskerville Bible, an English language Bible printed in 1763.

In addition to being more than 250 years old, this Bible is considered by scholars to be the finest Bible produced in the 18th century.

Jones’s collection includes more than 100 other rare and very old Bibles. His oldest complete Bible is a 1516 Latin Bible which contains 1,100 woodcut illustrations. This 501-year old Vulgate Bible was printed in France. The earliest Geneva Bible in the collection was printed in 1580. A Martin Luther relic could be the most interesting of all. It is a single page from a historically unrecorded printing of a 1529 Luther Bible in the common German dialect. The page was taken from a fragment (partial Bible) and no other 1529 has been located. The following year Luther printed a second German language Bible, the much recorded 1530 Luther Bible.