Of all negative book-reviews, the least justifiable are those that castigate books for not being entirely different books. It is reasonable to criticize a book for reaching what the reviewer believes are erroneous conclusions, but seldom appropriate to condemn it for being about the wrong subject, focusing on the wrong aspect of the right subject, or having the wrong date-range. The only books that deserve to be so treated are those whose titles promise more than their contents deliver. To prevent anyone from beginning this book with false expectations, therefore, I should like to explain both what it is and what it is not.

The title precisely defines my subject: the Stationers’ Company of London and the master printers who worked in that city in 1501–57. What stationers and companies were will be explained in Chapter 1, but for now let it suffice that in 1501 the Stationers’ Company was a trade organization and that the majority of its members were in the book trade, principally as booksellers and binders. This book is partly about the Company as a company – but it is also about the individual men and women who belonged to it: about what can be learned about their lives, as well as their work. It is also about the early printers of London (fewer than a third of whom were Stationers) and how the Company came to be granted a monopoly of their craft.