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They have become as familiar a feature of hotel stays as the little pots of milk and difficult-to-walk-in flip flop slippers. But why is it so common to find a bible in a hotel room?
The organisation responsible is called the Gideons and they began their mission in 1908.
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A new Christian organisation
The organisation was formed ten years earlier when American businessmen John H Nicholson and Samuel E Hill were forced to share a room at a fully booked hotel in Wisconsin. The pair discussed their Christian faith and came up with the idea of creating an association for travelling Christians.
The idea took a while to take off. At the first public meeting, Nicholson and Hill made up two of the three attendees. But gradually the association, now called the Gideons, attracted more members.
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The Gideons took their name from the prophet Gideon, depicted here with an angel
The first bibles
On 10 November, 1908 the first twenty-five bibles were placed in the Superior Hotel, Montana. Archie Bailey, a Gideon and regular visitor to the Superior, asked the hotel manager for permission to deliver the bibles and covered the cost himself.
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A global effort
Since then, the Gideons have placed more than two billion bibles in hotel rooms around the world and they claim that hotel surveys suggest as many as 25% of people read the bibles they find. The Gideon bibles have also encouraged hotels to place other religious texts in their rooms too.
However not every hotel room has a bible. The British Travelodge chain removed the bibles from a large number of its hotels in 2007. Elsewhere they have been replaced with other reading material, including copies of Fifty Shades of Grey in one Lake District hotel.