[sword-devel] KJV 1611

Barnes, Jeffrey jbarnesweb at yahoo.com
Fri Apr 12 17:51:06 MST 2013


Hi Mike,

Thanks for the link and the info.

On Apr 12, 2013, at 5:44:59PM, Mike Hart <just_mike_y at yahoo.com> wrote:

> The KJV1611 needs to be experienced as it was originally laid out to be fully understood how different it is from the "King George" version of the "King James Bible" It included Paragraphs ( marked with capitulums ¢), Sections (listed at the start of each Chapter), and Topical page headers, as well as translation footnotes(+), crossreferences(*), and alt readings(||). Not to mention the maps, and introductory materials like daily readings, perpetual calendar, etc.   The 1769 version of this text is stripped of much that was present in the original edition. 

I ordered a KJV 1611 about 20 years ago from CBD for 10 or 15 bucks. It used Roman faces, so it probably didn't meet your standards. But reading it was a joy. The way the words were presented with the spellings of the day caused the text to come alive to me. It was a very visual and aural experience. It put me in another mode of reading where one word flowed to the next, verse to verse, paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter. I ended up reading it from cover to cover.

> 
> Since the KJV1611 was typeset in not-very-repeatable black letter font, no good digitization of this text exists to my knowledge.  I've studied the roman text versions out there, and they are all much closer to the 1769 than the 1611 edition, including some that claim to be 'facsimile' editions except for the font.  ALL of the digital versions take liberty with spelling, changing the f's into S's and V's into U's, and many even keep much of the vocabulary adjustment you see in the "King George" 1769 ("cattle" instead of cattell, etc.)   

I don't recall that with the hard-back version I read. While the Roman typeface made u+017F look like an 'f', it seemed to follow the spellings you suggest.

> 
> A true facsimile of the 1611 King James Authorized Version can be seen here: 

Sigh. When I tried enlarging it, it froze.

What do you think about this one from U Penn's library?

http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Genesis-Chapter-1_Original-1611-KJV/

So it looks like it would be a tremendous effort to digitize. I think the face could be loosely matched with one of the Gothics and substitutions for glyphs could be done without much effort, but getting the font exact would be a lot of work. And getting the hyphens and spacings exact would be very difficult. Is there such a thing as good enough?

You wouldn't know the code point of the 'r' at the end of "for" in Genesis 1 would you?

Blessings.
Jeff

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