The power of the printed word to project royal ideology has been asserted very often in literary-historical studies but the material foundations of that claim have, incredibly, never been exposed in detail. The King's Printer Project aims to remedy that.

The project will attempt a new synthesis based on a mass of archival materials relating to the office, materials previously unknown to book historians, and ones which promise to throw altogether new light on the early-modern London book-trade, credit systems, business practices and their legal framework.

The project also sets out to integrate the results of our archival work with the results of a thorough study of the actual and vast output of the King's Printing House.