Whether you are a believer or not, the KJB — King James Bible of 1611 — is one of the world's greatest books and its publication changed the world. Therefore, here's one's chance to see a copy of it close up and in reasonable detail.

Unlike so many later facsimiles, this version retains its original late Middle Ages/Early Renaissance English spelling. To put this into perspective, Shakespeare lived from 1564 to 1616, so this 1611 edition was published whilst he was still alive.

(As many know, this Bible was the work of a committee and remarkably—unlike the work of so many committees—it actually turned out to be a remarkable work of literature in its own right.)

The Bible opens with a combined frontispiece/title page. An ornate line drawing fills most of the page but is blank at the centre except for its title which is at the centre top and spread over three lines. Immediately underneath is additional text including its publications date. Here is the frontispiece/title text in full:

  THE 
  HOLY 
  BIBLE,
  Conteyning the Old Testament,
  AND THE NEW:
  Newly Translatd out of the Originall 
  tongues: & with the former Translations
  diligently compared and reuised by his
  Maiesties Speciall Comandement.
  Appointed to be read in Churches.
  Imprinted at London by Robert
  Barker, Printer to the Kings
  most Excellent Maiestie
  Anno Dom. 1611

This is immediately followed by a dedication to the King from its Translators, following that comes 'The Epistle', 'Dedicatorie', 'The Translators to The Reader' followed by various religious calendar dates, lessons for special days, alphabetical list of names, maps of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, etc. It is not until about page 39 that we actually get to 'The First Book of Moses called GENESIS.'

There is much information included in this 1611 Edition which is not included in the recent and otherwise well annotated editions of the KJV such as the important Scofield Editions. This alone makes this work a feast for both religious scholars and book antiquarians alike.

This PDF version that I downloaded consists of 1506 pages and its file size is 1,923,870,199 bytes. The scan resolution is quite good but not excellent which is a shame. Moreover, little or no attempt has be made to straighten or make pages linear, which is shame. I will attempt to download the jp2 (jpeg 2000) version later and see if it is any better.

There is a smaller PDF that also includes the text but like most Internet Archive OCR attempts it is dismally inaccurate and full of errors.