I have no idea what this is a scan of, but there are no extant copies known of the first printing of the 1611 KJV which underwent revision before the 2nd edition. Perhaps that page was not changed, perhaps it was, I don’t know. I wonder if Amazon has a modern KJV and how it is laid out? Maybe they have a look inside the cover - possibly placement is traditional and something can be gleaned from that.
Regardless, all of the Canon is included.
There were actually two folio editions of the KJV which were both published in 1611, known respectively as the ‘He’ Bible and the ‘She’ Bible. The names derive from the way each of these editions render Ruth 3:15: one reads “he (Boaz) went into the city;” the other reads “she (Ruth) went into the city.” The difficulty lies in that the Hebrew has “he,” but the sense of the passage demands that Ruth rather than Boaz go into the city. It would seem that the ‘He’ Bible is the earlier version and that the translators deliberately changed the pronoun from “she” in the Bishops’ Bible. AFAIK, ‘He’ Bibles are rarer than ‘She’ Bibles: fewer than fifty copies versus fewer than 150.
Speaking of online versions,
this one and
this one are both ‘He’ Bibles, while
this one is a ‘She’ Bible.
Actual publication dates are pretty much confusing though. From
Gordon Campbell’s Bible: The Story of the King James Version:
The first edition of the KJV (the ‘He’ Bible) published by the king’s printer was a large folio, as was the second (the ‘She’ Bible). Both were published in 1611, but the second edition was relaunched in 1613, so the date on the title page of the second edition may be 1611, 1612, or 1613. The second edition is a page-for-page reprint of the first, so when the compositor reached Exodus 14:10, in which three lines are repeated in the first edition, the compositor of the second corrected the error and then executed some fancy footwork to ensure that the page ended at the same point. Something seems to have happened to Boel’s engraved title page (it may have been broken or lost, or he may have taken it to Spain with him), and a woodcut imitation of Boel’s engraving was used instead.
The printing of the first edition of the KJV seems to have started before the copy-editing was finished (hence, for example, the lack of paragraph markings after Acts 20), but the high quality of the finished product implies that printing had not been hurried. The same cannot be said for the second edition of 1611, which shows signs of being a rushed response to the brisk sales of the first edition. One striking feature is that some copies consist of a mixture of pages from the first and second editions. Another sign of haste is the number of prominent misprints. The dedication, for example, refers to ‘Chkist our Lord,’ and in some copies, ‘that eateth’ (Jeremiah 31:30) is printed as ‘ehat tateth’, an error that should have been noticed by any proof-reader, even one freshly returned from a pub lunch. The best-known error is the printing of ‘Judas’ instead of ‘Jesus’ in Matthew 26:36, a gaffe that has led to the ‘She Bible’ being referred to as the Judas Bible.
Some thirty readings from the second edition survive into modern KJV texts. Most are corrections of misprints, but at least one creates an error: the first edition read ‘waters of gall’ in Jeremiah 8:14, because the Hebrew form is plural; the second edition changed the text to ‘water of gall’, and this incorrect reading has yet to be expunged. There is a more problematical issue concerning the word ‘shew’ (the old form of ‘show’) in Hosea 6:5, in which the first edition reads ‘therefore have I shewed them by the Prophets’; the second edition reads ‘therefore have I hewed them by the Prophets’, which is the reading that survives in modern editions of the KJV. But was ‘shew’ an error? It was not a misprint, as the annotated Bishops’ Bible in the Bodleian shows, but rather a deliberate decision on the part of the translators. ‘Hew’ is an accurate translation of the Hebrew, but ‘shew’ may well reflect the reading of the Aramaic paraphrase known as the Jonathan Targum; if ‘shew’ is a mistake, it is one that reflects the judgement of the translators rather than the accuracy of the typesetters.
(I do read through it on occasion though as I enjoy it as well).
I totally agree. I also use a KJV that has the Apocrypha. I always wondered if there were any other Catholics who did. I own a few other translations, too, but nothing else comes close to the KJV.
(No offense meant) BTW, I just read that the very first Bible printed in America (