The Holy Bible (King James Version), with its preface “The Translators to the Reader”

The first edition was printed in London by Robert Barker, the king’s printer, in 1611. The title page describes the work as newly translated out of the original tongues, with the former translations diligently compared and revised, by the king’s special commandment, and as “Appointed to be read in Churches”. The table of books sets “the Bookes called Apocrypha” between the Old Testament and the New.

Two pieces stand before the text. The Epistle Dedicatory addresses James as the mover of the work. The Translators to the Reader, which is unsigned, defends the making of translations in general, answers Catholic and Puritan critics, and describes the translators’ aims and method: to make “out of many good ones one principal good one”, to work from the Hebrew and Greek, to set alternative senses in the margin, and not to tie themselves to rendering a word always by the same English word. It also says that the proposal arose at the Hampton Court conference. It is the translators’ own statement, and is cited as such in the King James Bible.