Geneva

The Geneva Bible was a huge contrast to Henry VIII’s large folio Great Bible, or Matthew’s before that: but the contrast was not only in the pleasing small size. It is also handsome. For the first time, an English bible text was printed not in heavy ‘Gothic’ Black Letter in northern Europe by printers in Antwerp or London, but in Switzerland, by Conrad Badius, the son of the master-printer of Paris, in a clean, clear Roman, a French style also influenced by Italian printers trained in the more refined humanist manner.