The American Standard Version began as somebody else's project. When the Church of England set out in 1870 to revise the King James Version, it invited American scholars to take part, and they did — by correspondence, across the Atlantic, for the better part of two decades. Where the two sides disagreed, the British committee's reading went into the text and the American preference into an appendix, and the Americans agreed to hold back an edition of their own for fourteen years. The English Revised Version appeared in 1881 and 1885. The American edition followed in 1901, with the appendix readings moved up into the text where their editors had always wanted them.
It is a translation made by scholars for scholars, and it reads like one. The revisers stayed as close to Hebrew and Greek word order as English would tolerate, which makes the ASV exact and, in long stretches, stiff. Its most visible decision is the divine name: where the King James Version printed “the LORD” in capitals, the ASV prints “Jehovah”, thousands of times, all through the Old Testament. In the New Testament it follows the revisers' Greek rather than the Textus Receptus, so readings the King James translators had and older manuscripts do not — the Trinitarian clause at 1 John 5:7 among them — are footnoted or absent.
The ASV never became a pew Bible. What it became was a parent. The Revised Standard Version of 1952 was a revision of it; so was the New American Standard Bible, which is in this corpus too; and so is the World English Bible, which carried the ASV into the public domain in modern spelling. That is why it sits where it does in the reader's lineage rungs — the middle of the longest chain the corpus has. Open a rung beneath an ASV verse and the Revised Version it was made from appears under it, and beneath that the King James Version and the Geneva Bible, down to the original-language floor marked with ≈. Open a rung beneath a World English Bible verse and you arrive back here.