Englands Helicon (1600) has been described by Rollins as the ‘most beautiful of the Elizabethan poetical miscellanies’. The quality of its production is down to the work of a highly effective network of compilers, publishers, printers, and writers specialising in compilations in the late 1590s, often known as the ‘Bodenham circle’, after its patron and fellow compiler, John Bodenham, a wealthy gentleman Grocer. Englands Helicon is a highly crafted book in a number of interrelated senses. The anthology is embedded in the social and cultural world of those guilds active in the book trade in the late sixteenth century that were, in turn, incorporated within the wider civic community of early modern London. Not surprisingly, when accounts are given of the craft of compilation in the prefatory material, an earlier humanist language, now familiar from the epistles of Tottel and Disle, is called upon to set out the ethical foundations of the book trade and its service to the commonwealth. The collaborative working practices fostered through these company structures inform the craft of editing displayed in Englands Helicon, from the anthology’s design to the account given of editing in its prefatory material. Englands Helicon provides this study with an opportunity to explore how specialisation in the production of certain classes of books, in this case, the compilation, shaped the form and meaning of the anthology. Englands Helicon was part of a wider publishing project. Those engaged in its production compiled and edited a series of compilations in quick succession – Politeuphuia, Wits Common wealth (1597), Wits Theater of the Little World (1599), Bel-vedére or the Garden of the Muses (1600), and Englands Helicon (1600). Specialisation by publishers, as Zachary Lesser has shown, was a commercial imperative providing a means of managing resources and protecting investments. In this chapter, my interest is in the craft aspects of specialisation: how the hands-on experience of making compilations was shared among those engaged in their production, enabling reflection on the craft of editing that is then given material expression in the design of Englands Helicon.