ABSTRACT
It has been estimated that 322 editions and 83 variant editions of the Bible in English were published between 1525 and 1659, and that during the same period 190 editions and 22 variant editions of the New Testament in English were issued. Both Bibles and New Testaments were exempt from the Stationers’ Company limit on the print run of an edition, and it appears that by 1660 perhaps as many as 850,000 copies of the Bible in English and 450,000 copies of the New Testament in English had been printed. Even allowing for wear and tear these figures suggest that many households possessed either an English Bible or New Testament. Produced by English exiles in the heartland of Calvinism and first issued in 1560, the Geneva version of the English Bible was the first to be printed in roman type and the first to divide the text into chapters and verses. Though popular among Protestants for many years the pocketable Geneva Bible with its helpful if sometimes provocative marginalia was eventually supplanted by the so-called Authorized Version of 1611. Derived largely from the translation of William Tyndale (d.1536) and stripped of marginal notes, the Authorized Version was issued in a number of different editions – some with a series of genealogies and a map of the Holy Land appended. Few editions, however, with the notable exception of those printed at Cambridge University from 1629, could claim to be an accurate text.
