It began as a concession at a meeting about something else. At the Hampton Court Conference of 1604, called by James I to hear Puritan grievances about the prayer book, a proposal for a new translation was raised and the king took it up. Forty-seven scholars were appointed and divided into six companies — two at Westminster, two at Oxford, two at Cambridge — each with a section of the Bible and a set of rules to work by. The first of those rules is the one that matters most for reading it: they were to follow the Bishops' Bible of 1568, and alter it only as the original required. This was commissioned as a revision, not as a fresh translation, and it reads like one. Robert Barker, the King's Printer, published the finished book in London in 1611.
What the rules did not say, and what the translators did anyway, was keep reaching back past the Bishops' Bible. The English they inherited had been made by other people — Tyndale above all, and the Geneva Bible that a generation of English readers actually owned and read at home. This corpus records that debt rather than leaving it to the introduction: the King James Version's parents here are the [[GNV|Geneva Bible]], with the Received Text and the Masoretic Hebrew beneath. Open a lineage rung under a King James verse and Geneva is what comes up. The two are close enough, verse after verse, that the interesting question stops being whether Geneva was used and becomes where the 1611 committees chose to depart from it — which is a thing you can now look at rather than take on trust.
One difference between this King James and most others is a matter of what is in it. The text here runs to eighty books and 36,820 verses: the Old and New Testaments and the fourteen books of the Apocrypha, printed between them, as the 1611 volume printed them. Nearly every King James Bible sold today has sixty-six. The corpus keeps the longer shape, and the effect is visible along the chain the lineage records: the [[GNV|Geneva Bible]] here has sixty-six books, this has eighty, [[RV|the Revised Version]] above it eighty, and [[ASV|the American Standard Version]] above that sixty-six again. Whether an edition prints the Apocrypha is a decision each of them made separately, and putting them in one column makes the pattern legible.
Be careful about what the year on the card means. It says 1611, and that is the date of the translation — it is not a claim about which printing this text is. The English here is modernised in spelling: Genesis opens “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”, where the 1611 sheets read “In the beginning God created the Heauen, and the Earth”. So this is the King James as later printers standardised it, and the particular printing behind it is not recorded — the same honest gap the corpus leaves for [[FB1776|the Finnish Bible of 1776]]. For reading the translators' choices it makes no difference; for quoting the 1611 book as an artefact, it makes all of it. Note too that this is not the edition an English interface opens on: that is [[NIV|the New International Version]], and the King James is one you switch to.