This Bible was made abroad, by people who could not safely stay at home. When Mary I came to the throne in 1553 and England returned to Rome, a few hundred Protestants left; a number of them settled in Calvin's Geneva, where they had presses, Hebrew and Greek scholarship, and no bishop to answer to. William Whittingham published a New Testament there in 1557. A team under Anthony Gilby worked through the Old Testament, and the complete Bible was printed at Geneva by Rowland Hall in 1560, two years after Mary's death, when most of the exiles had already gone home.
What they produced changed what an English Bible looked like. It was the first to number every verse, so a reader could be pointed to a line rather than to a chapter. It was set in Roman type instead of blackletter, and issued small enough and cheap enough to be owned rather than chained to a lectern. And the margins were full: cross-references, glosses on hard words, maps, and notes explaining what a passage meant. That last part is why it was loved and why it was resented. The notes are Reformed, sharply so in places, and they tell the reader what to think about kings as readily as about doctrine.
The date on this edition needs a word of caution, because the Geneva Bible was not one book but a text reprinted for eighty years while its parts changed. In 1576 Laurence Tomson replaced the New Testament with his own revision, made against Theodore Beza's Greek edition of 1565, and from 1587 that is the New Testament most Geneva Bibles carry. In 1599 Franciscus Junius's notes on Revelation were added. “1599” therefore names a configuration — Tomson's New Testament plus Junius on Revelation — more precisely than it names a year of printing, and Bibles bearing that date went on being printed after it. That is why the catalogue card leaves the year blank while the rung chip, which needs something short to show, reads GNV 1599.
Its position in this collection is a hinge. The longest lineage chain here runs World English Bible to American Standard Version to Revised Version to King James Version, and then to this: open one more rung beneath a King James verse and the Geneva wording appears underneath it, which is the plainest way to see how much of the King James is inherited rather than composed. Beneath the Geneva there is nothing further in English — only the Greek and the Hebrew, the Textus Receptus and the Westminster Leningrad Codex, where the ladder reaches its floor. The text is given as the edition has it, spelling and all, so Genesis 1:1 says heauen; Psalm superscriptions and the colophon to Hebrews run inline at the start of the first verse, as those printings set them, and have been left there rather than tidied out.