Norton reconstructs the textual history of the King James Bible from the translators' surviving notes and working evidence through the two 1611 printings, early correction, eighteenth-century standardization, Scrivener's nineteenth-century edition, and Norton's own New Cambridge Paragraph Bible. Computer-assisted collations and extensive appendices distinguish translation decisions, printing errors, spelling and punctuation changes, and later editorial interventions.

The result is the strongest documentary history of the KJV's English text. Norton demonstrates that no single unaltered 1611 printing became the modern standard and that later editors both corrected and sometimes obscured the translators' work. His own editorial preferences remain open to debate, but the underlying evidence is presented with unusual fullness and transparency.