The Wicked Bible is a 1631 reprint of the King James Bible that accidentally ordered its readers to sin. Setting the Ten Commandments, London's royal printers dropped the word "not" from Exodus 20:14, so the Seventh Commandment read "Thou shalt commit adultery."
It was not the only slip. Deuteronomy came out praising "his glory and his great-asse" rather than his greatness. The double blunder was bad enough that some historians suspect a rival printer sabotaged the job to get the pair's lucrative Bible license revoked; in a few surviving copies, an inkblot sits exactly where the missing "n" should be, as if someone had tried to hide it.
The printers were summoned to the Star Chamber, fined 300 pounds, and stripped of their license, and most of the run was burned. About 25 copies survive, prized by collectors — one sold at Sotheby's in 2018 for $56,250.
