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This book sets out to show how new markets were cultivated by printers in the period 1476–1550. It argues that while print and manuscript reading continued alongside each other, developments in the marketing of printed texts began to change what readers read, the ways they read and the place of reading in their lives on a larger scale and at a faster pace than had occurred before. Rather than attempting to offer a superficial survey of how the marketing of every kind of book developed, it focuses on three broad (but not wholly discreet) categories: religious reading, secular reading, and practical reading. Within those categories, the chapters focus in detail on the development of types of book that either emerged for the first time during this period (evangelical books, news pamphlets) or underwent considerable changes in presentation (devotional texts, romances, travel guides, household works). The chapters examine the presentation of early printed editions, paying particular attention to paratexts, with the aim of illuminating the range of techniques that printers used to convince potential buyers to part with their money. The printers of these works were predominantly based in London, but this book places their efforts within a wider European context. It demonstrates that, just as English manuscripts were moulded by foreign influences, English printers responded to their European counterparts’ experiments in the marketing of books.

Chapter 4 explores how English printers developed a domestic market for a different kind of novel material: news itself, ranging from accounts of natural marvels through to polemical exchanges about current events. In doing so, they followed the example of their continental counterparts. Accounts of state affairs emulated Parisian publications, while news about calamitous events was frequently translated from best-selling European pamphlets. The chapter argues that printers persuaded readers to pay for what had traditionally been received free, by word of mouth, by emphasizing the reliability and veracity of the news they published rather than—as is often assumed—appealing to a taste for sensation or moralization. Concluding the chapter with a discussion of the news pamphlets and broadsides surrounding the Western Rebellion in 1549, it suggests that by the mid-sixteenth century printed news had gained sufficient status that its circulation could influence events, giving printers a potential power and responsibility they had not anticipated.

Chapter 1 considers how printers persuaded readers to buy religious books other than primers, which might well have seemed non-essential. Focusing on the period up to 1525, it considers the sale of books that supported the laity in understanding the most basic aspects of their faith and those that guided them beyond the rote prayers of the Pater noster and Ave Maria into deeper practices of meditation and contemplation. It argues that de Worde recognized the spiritual ambitions of his contemporaries and the desire for a deeper knowledge of God amongst the laity. While the 1520s would see that channelled into demand for scriptural translation, in the first quarter of the century de Worde offered readers a richer relationship with God through contemplative practices.