“Deceiue not thy self with the bad sale of his booke,” says Senior Importuno to his friend in Thomas Nashe's Haue with you to Saffron-Walden (1596). “While Printing lasts, thy disgrace may last, & the Printer (whose Copie it is) may leaue thy infamie in Legacie to his heyres, and his heyres to their next heyres successiuely to the thirteenth and fourteenth generation, Cum Priuilegio, forbidding all other to Print those lewd lying Recordes of thy scandal and contumely.”

It is with this figure of the publisher, whose decisions actively shape literary taste for generations to come, that Kirk Melnikoff is concerned in Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture. In this work, he paints the book trade publisher as a pivotal agent in the formation of an English vernacular literary culture in the second half of the sixteenth century. Melnikoff looks at publishers’ lists as representing practical decisions by agents familiar with the close circle of publishing in Elizabeth London, while arguing that these commitments should also be understood as acts of cultural intervention, with consequences for how texts were encountered and understood by Elizabethan audiences.

Melnikoff begins with an overview of publishing practices within the Elizabethan book trade. Subsequent chapters turn to case studies of publishers and their influence on the development of particular genres, practices, or forms in the book trade. Drawing on Peter Blayney's work on the Stationers’ Company, Melnikoff argues that the publisher-bookseller became increasingly influential in the London book trade over the course of the sixteenth century. Primarily reliant on job printing for publication, the publisher acted as literary agent and financier, concerned with the publication, marketing, and distribution of works, but outsourcing the printing itself.

Richard Helgerson's Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (1992) is an influential presence in Elizabeth Publishing, and some of the strongest moments can be found in Melnikoff's reconfiguration of the mechanics of the book trade as moments of literary intervention by publisher-booksellers. In chapter 2, Melnikoff examines the career of Thomas Hacket, bookseller, and his role in shaping and marketing the particular genre of the translated travel narrative. In chapter 3, he highlights the practice of browsing, focusing on the bookseller Richard Smith and the role of the browsable compendium at his St. Paul's bookshop. In chapter 4, Melnikoff turns to reissued works, and the associative rebranding that could reinvent these titles in readers’ understanding. The decision by the publishers—the stationer, Paul Linley, and his draper-bookbinder partner, John Flasket—to reissue Marlowe's and Nashe's The Tragedy of Dido Queen of Carthage (1590) with John Dickinson's Arisbas, Euphues amidst his Slumbers (1594) was pragmatic: Linley and Flasket had acquired the sheets in buying the previous printer's inventory, after his death. Melnikoff argues that this decision was not simply economic, but also represented a moment of cultural reinvention: in its new assemblage, the Linley-Flasket Dido was associated by its readers with Ovid, rather than with Vergil. Melnikoff concludes in Chapter 5 with a study of the first quarto edition of Hamlet, presenting this as an instance of specialization by the publisher Nicholas Ling.

The acquisition of copy, selection of translators, authoring of prefaces or title pages: these are familiar moments in the study of early modern English print culture, yet often examined as purely economic and impartial decisions, in which the “rational man” of the early modern book world exerted microeconomic choice. The great strength of Melnikoff's study lies in his reimagination of the publisher, a figure embedded in the practicalities of the book trade, yet (in Melnikoff's argument) interested in imagining and influencing audiences for Elizabethan vernacular literature through the agency of publication. In Melnikoff's reading, publishers’ decisions shaped Elizabethan literary culture as much as those of authors and printers.

Melnikoff's work makes a welcome contribution to the study of Elizabethan print culture, a subject galvanized in recent years by the scholarship of Peter Blayney and Zachary Lesser, among others. This is a field, as Melnikoff acknowledges, still overwhelmingly defined by the legacy of New Bibliography, and particularly (in Melnikoff's book) that of Ronald McKerrow and his A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of Foreign Printers of English Books 1557–1640 (1910). New Bibliography asked the still pressing question of how the processes of textual production also acted as instances of mediation. Where scholars of the New Bibliography tended to focus on the printer as agent in this process, Melnikoff reclaims from McKerrow and others the figure of the publisher.

The book's limitation might be that it follows New Bibliography in its conflation of literary culture with that of print, the book trade, and the circle of Shakespeare. This is a view of Elizabethan literary culture that is rooted as much in the twentieth-century English Department curriculum as in the Elizabethan period itself. In his reclamation of the agency of the publisher-bookseller in the Elizabethan book trade, Melnikoff also responds to the New Bibliography tradition, challenging this reductionist view of textual production in favor of a more complex and idiosyncratic figure of the publisher, and the possibilities for publishers’ influence on an English literary imagination.