This is the first book to demonstrate how mnemotechnic cultural commonplaces can be used to account for the look, style, and authorized content of some of the most influential books produced in early modern Britain. In his hybrid role as stationer, publisher, entrepreneur, and author, John Day, master printer of England’s Reformation, produced the premier navigation handbook, state-approved catechism and metrical psalms, Book of Martyrs, England’s first printed emblem book, and Queen Elizabeth’s Prayer Book. By virtue of finely honed book trade skills, dogged commitment to evangelical nation-building, and astute business acumen (including going after those who infringed his privileges), Day mobilized the typographical imaginary to establish what amounts to—and still remains—a potent and viable Protestant Memory Art.

The night before, he had approached the town from the east, along the road that leads past Mount Olive, and hungry, cold and weary, had sought shelter of the friendly stack, much preferring a bed of straw and the companionship of cattle to any lodging place he might find in the city, less clean and among a ruder company. It was early March and the smoke from a nearby block of smelters was lost in a chilling mist, while a raw wind made the young man shiver as he stood picking the bits of straw from his clothing. When he had brushed his garments as best he could and had stretched his numb and stiffened limbs, he looked long and thoughtfully at the city lying half hidden in its shroud of gray. . . .

In a hot, crowded courtroom in colonial New York, on an August day in 1735, a jury found printer John Peter Zenger innocent of the charge of seditious libel against the British royal governor. The verdict established the political precedent for the right of people to criticize their government in print and helped shape the Bill of Rights more than fifty years later. Combining narrative with voices from primary sources, the book shows the conflict between characters that led to this momentous trial in American history.--From publisher description.

The time is the Depression years of the 1930's, the dirty thirties as they were then called. The place is the town/village of Nelsonville, Dutchess County, New York. The characters, Leroy Andrew Bridges, the printer's devil and editorial assistant employed by the Nelsonville Times, a weekly newspaper published in the aforesaid town/village of Nelsonville. Guy S. Bailey, the editor and publishers of the Times, a disabled veteran of the Great War, presently undergoing treatment for his injuries in a hospital in Virginia, the linotype operator, Clayton F. Lewis or Lewis Clayton Funk, best known as Clay, the only man Leroy knows of with two different names, and Will, for Willard or William, Barnes, the printer-compositor of the paper and Mrs. Belle Bailey, wife of the editor and publisher Guy S. Bailey and who, in the absence of her husband, is carrying on the family printing and publishing business, and many others. Those characters and many others play their parts in the story that ends up in a gory episode in the old abandoned quarry out on the Old Sharon Road.