I found it pretty handy in college. I was taking a lot of English lit and having a nice little NT was rather helpful.
Off topic, and for that I apologize, but I have been to a few hotels that post signs asking guests not to do this. And among those, I have even seen hotels that additionally invite guests who particularly enjoy the toiletries to purchase them at the front desk in household-sized quantities.
So, apparently, at least a few hotels do care at least superficially about it.
Psalm 36 v4:
In Japan my room had a book of Buddha. I confess that I *did *take that - and have read bits of it too.
Nowdays, Boscobel itself is the wild turkey hunting capital of Wisconsin.
-OT, but I love that town’s name!
Does anyone have a copy of a Gideon Bible? Don’t they actually say in a preface that you can take the Bible if you wish? Yes, they expect the bible to be there a long time and they hope that the people in the room will read it and leave it, but they say explicitly (if I recall correctly) that if you really want to you can take the Bible home with you.
I picked one up 30 years ago that said to take it if I wanted it. It was stamped or written on the inside cover. I wanted to see how far off from our church’s bible it was. I had it until last year’s flood.
Of course, Psalms isn’t in the NT…
Harmonious Discord writes:
> I had it until last year’s flood.
Wow, that’s a selective flood. It seeped into your house and washed away one book on one shelf.
It was a great flood. Unfortunately I’m still cleaning up and it wasn’t the only thing we had to throw out. Hopefully the main basement will be waterproof once again by spring. That’s what I’ve concentrated repairs on.
If you were in a hotel with a Book of Mormon, it was probably owned by Marriott.
I never have figured out putting a BoM in the room while also making porn available on the TV.
Every room in a Marriott Hotel in the US and Canada has a Book of Mormon because the Marriott family are Mormon.
Interesting. So they just mail hotel managers crates of books with instructions to put them in each room, they don’t do it themselves ? That’s… disheartening. I always imagined them like Bill Hicks did, as furtive Bible ninjas.
Come to think about it, does that mean there may be Gideon-free hotels out there because the staff refused to comply ? And if I wanted all to know the joy and message of Neil Gaiman, could I send crates of Sandman (appropriate ;)) to every Holliday Inn with instructions to make them available to all guests to make it happen, or is there a strict Holy Books Only policy ?
But my Gideon Bible was really “New Testament with Psalms”–they stuck those in too.
And Proverbs? My baby bibles always had Proverbs, too.
The ones I’ve usually seen were NT w/ Psalms & Proverbs.
Proverbs is a nice practical book but how it qualifies to be packed with the NT instead of a “Highlights of the OT” still escapes me.
Cool! This gets me thinking … has anyone ever seen a Torah/Tanakh or Koran in a hotel room? I have my doubts about a Koran, because of the protocol about how the physical book is to be treated; there’s no guarantee it would not be abused. As for a Torah/Tanakh, there’s not the same protocol, but in Judaism it’s generally taboo to take a prayer book into a bathroom.
You will never find a Koran in a hotel room in an Islamic country (unless of course it belongs to the guest). It’s too sacred to risk the possible abuse. You might find an arrow somewhere pointing toward Mecca.
Not necessarily. I live in a majority Middle Eastern neighborhood in Chicago, and the Muslim equivalent of the Gideons left an English translation of the Koran in a plastic bag on my doorknob. It was accompanied by sheet of paper with a request to treat it respectfully. Until it appeared, I had never experienced any Islamic prostelization.
Even if you are a very speedy reader, you’re not likely to finish the whole thing in one hotel stay. For such a popular book, it’s a long and difficult read.
I’m not sure what your point is, gaffa. Of course I didn’t mean that it was possible to read all of the Bible in one hotel stay. I meant that the Gideons wanted people staying in the room to read part of the Bible and then leave it in the room. However, if the hotel guests wanted to take it home with them so that they could read more of it, the Gideons are happy to let them take it home.