This chapter considers reprints as new editions and insists that they offer the clearest indication of an author or play’s popularity. I explore the accessibility of Shakespeare’s plays between 1660 and the turn of the century, place quarto playbook publication in the context of late seventeenth-century politics, and highlight how traditional periodization, folio-centric scholarship and attitudes toward abbreviated and altered playtexts have distorted our view of the print history of Renaissance drama. I argue that Shakespeare’s unaltered plays were not recognised as marketable print commodities until c. 1681, a development reflected in publishers’ willingness in the 1680s and 1690s to not just publish his plays but also risk facing the consequences associated with pirate printing ventures. The chapter intervenes in long-standing debates about the causes and measurability of Shakespeare’s popularity and his relationship to authorship, genre, and the canon in the late seventeenth-century book trade.

This chapter is on the print aspect of ballads. Part one shows that theatre ballads were published as occasion-specific souvenirs, and asks when stationers (i.e., publishers) commissioned theatre ballads, when they ‘stole’ them, and when they simply accepted them from authors and playhouses. It focuses on John Danter, John Trundle and Abel Jeffes, who sent their own chapmen (roving sellers of print texts) to trade around the playhouses. Part two considers normal and celebrity popular ballad writers, like William Elderton, Thomas Deloney, Richard Johnson and Martin Parker, investigating the sums of money they might make from publishers. Part three explores purchasers who bought theatre ballads for their print qualities: to use as wastepaper, decoration, or reading matter.

This chapter explains the value of incorporting materialist analysis into studies of intellectual history and the history of science by examining the curious case of a tiny anonymous herbal that was one of the most popular English books of the sixteenth century. It shows that these works of natural history have been receiving increased attention from scholars and that this scholarship is unfortunately limited by too much attention upon herbals’ authors to the detriment of those figures who commissioned, marketed, made, and sold botanical books to an eager early modern public.

This chapter demonstrates how and why the little Herball became such an amazing commercial success, and it raises the possibility that the audience for English herbals did not rise and fall with the expensive texts preferred by elite scholarly readers or gentry. The publishing history of the little Herball reveals that the purchasing preferences of Tudor London’s middling readers, as well as the regulatory constraints upon bookmaking and bookselling, created the economic conditions that later enabled the large, illustrated folio herbals of Turner, Gerard, and Parkinson to come into being. In other words, these large books with named authors on their title pages were a secondary development in the tradition of the printed English herbal, suggesting that the “author-function” that governed a text’s authoritative value was initially irrelevant to English readers. The association between herbals and particular botanical authorities did not result from readers’ perceptions of their accuracy but can be traced to commercial concerns: their publishers’ desire to sell an old and profitable text in innovative new ways.

To reveal the sophisticated and nuanced calculus of English stationers, this chapter explores the recursive relationship between readers’ responses to printed herbals and the activities of the publishers who catered to them, as well as the shifting regulatory mechanisms that enabled stationers to navigate the amount of financial risk that herbal publication increasingly asked of them.

This chapter broadens Foucault’s ideas of the author-function to include such textual progenitors as stationers, printers, and booksellers. It argues that authorship is a mode of self-fashioning and highlights the ways that the sociology of truth demands that others recognize one’s authorial and expert claims over a knowledge domain like natural history. It explains why Adrian Johns’s concept of stationer “credit” is of limited use and why his conflation of plagiarism and piracy confuses two separate issues of impropriety that undergo radical changes in the sixteenth century. It suggests making a “bibliographic turn” to remedy Johns’s interpretation of Steven Shapin’s “social history” and better account for bibliographic scholarship.