Breeches Bible
The Holy Bible. Printed by Christopher Barker in Pater noster Rowe, at the Signe of the Tygres head, [1577, no main title, dated from NT title]; with Sternhold and Hopkins, Printed at London by John Day, 1576. Folio, bound between boards, no spine, in custom made clamshell box; unpaginated, signed: OT: B6-3O6 (lacking title, prelims and A1-6); Apocrypha: 4A6-4M6, 4N6; NT: [2 (NT title, Description of Holy Land (with map vignette))], 5A6-5X6; Sternhold: A6-H1 (lacking to end, C2 mis-signed B2); map plates (originally double, lacking from central fold), woodcuts to text, floriated initials.
Christopher Barker was printer to Elizabeth I and, likely through powerful friends at court such as the Walsingham family, acquired the privilege of printing the Geneva version of the Bible in England. He began printing bibles in 1576 and in 1577 obtained a patent which included the Old and New Testament in English, with or without notes, of any translation.

Breeches Bibles are a variant of the Geneva Bible translation. Perhaps the most historically significant English translation of the Bible after the King James Version (KJV). The Geneva Bible (from where the first edition was published in 1560) was probably the first mechanically printed, mass-produced bible available to the general public - especially in a size suitable for non-liturgical use. It was immensely popular, owing in part to the power of its translation. The most significant theological aspect was the glossing and marginalia which were Puritan (and especially Calvinist) in manner - thus often in opposition to the ruling Anglicans of the Church of England and the English government.
The popularity was such (Scotland even passing a law requiring households of sufficient means to own a copy) that it spurred Elizabeth I to produce the Bishops' Bible, the Catholics to produce the Douai and Rheims Bible, and ultimately James I to produce the Authorised Version in order to replace it. Such was the importance of the translation - despite official antipathy towards the glossing - the Geneva Bible was an approved source for the translators of the KJV. The Geneva translation was then the Bible of Shakespeare, Cromwell, Knox, Donne and Bunyan. This translation is known as a ''Breeches'' Bible owing to a curious translation of a passage from Genesis iii.7: ''Then the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed figge tree leaves together, and made themselves breeches.'' In the 1611 KJV this was changed to ''aprons''. The Tomson revisions of the New Testament were completed in 1576 and would be later used by Barker for his Bibles (see Lots 2+3) Herbert 148.