With this rewarding study Elizabeth Evenden has greatly expanded understanding of John Day, who was the leading English printer active during the Elizabethan age. He gained renown as the publisher of John Foxe's Acts and monuments, which is best known by its popular title, the ‘Book of Martyrs’. Evenden grounds her study on investigation of fundamental elements of printing (for example, typography, layout and format of books, woodcut illustration, quality of paper and so forth), but she moves beyond bibliographical analysis by situating Day within the broad context of the history of religion, politics, printing and patronage during the English reformations. Uncovering a rich vein of fresh archival evidence, she documents the importance of William Cecil, Elizabeth i's leading minister, and other leading patrons, notably Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, and Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, in procuring the array of patents that ensured Day's financial success by enabling him to monopolise the production and sale of many categories of books. A shrewd business man, Day balanced lucrative profits from the sale of ‘steady sellers’, notably a plethora of cheap editions of the ABC and metrical psalms of Sternhold and Hopkins, with the production of expensive books of high quality destined for an elite readership that included aristocrats close to the centre of power under Elizabeth. Among Evenden's important contributions is the discovery of documentary evidence that effectively identifies Day as the producer of anti-Catholic tracts printed surreptitiously under the false imprint of ‘Michael Wood of Rouen’ during the reign of Mary Tudor, when Day's Protestant partisanship placed him at considerable risk, and demonstrates that the Elizabethan government made a concerted effort to disseminate the second edition of the ‘Book of Martyrs’. Evenden's account of Parker's patronage of hand-coloured presentation copies of books printed by Day, many of them in fine bindings, is informative in the extreme. In what ways might she have improved this valuable monograph? Although she appropriately focuses on a printer who was at the forefront of book production within England, it must be recognised that its insular book trade was dwarfed by the output of the great publishing houses that thrived in the cities of continental Europe. At least some comparison of this printer's career with that of continental magnates such as Christoph Plantin might have provided a sense of scale within which to understand Day's achievement. She devotes little attention to the cultural context of Day's career as well as the iconographical dimension of the woodcuts that he employed in producing the best-illustrated English books of their time. She might have reduced her reliance on conjecture, albeit very well-informed conjecture. Some errors are present, of course, such as her attribution to Jan van der Noot of poems by Clément Marot and Joaquim du Bellay that appeared in Day's French and Dutch editions of the Theatre for worldlings (p. 97) and her identification of the third edition of the ‘Book of Martyrs’ as a one-volume rather than a two-volume book (p. 153). One may forgive the natural tendency of a younger scholar to cite her own publications, but it is worthy of note that she gives little notice to a considerable body of secondary scholarship on the printing career of John Day in this otherwise well-documented book. More generous acknowledgment of preexisting work might have been appropriate.