BATCHELOR, John (trans.).

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The Book of Common Prayer, Translated into Ainu. First edition, signed and dated 9 March 1940 by the translator on the first blank. Batchelor lived in close proximity to the Ainu for over six decades and spearheaded the study and preservation of their language and culture. "He is rightly revered in Hokkaido, where his house in Sapporo has been preserved as a Batchelor museum. With his long snow-white beard, he was seen in his final years almost as a biblical patriarch" (Cortazzi).Born in England in 1855, Batchelor ventured east in 1875 and accepted a missionary posting in Japan with the Church Missionary Society in 1876. With the exception of brief spells of home leave or sojourns in Tokyo, he lived in Hokkaido continuously until 1941, when war forced him to finally leave. He published the first of his many books on the Ainu in 1892 and spent much of the 1890s occupied with translation, having created his own method of transcription. Batchelor's rendition of the New Testament from Greek into Ainu appeared in 1897.Griffiths describes only an alternative issue, which has a cancel overslip on the title page attributing publication to SPCK.

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