| Summary: | One of the great values of Thomason’s collection of civil war tracts and newsbooks is the opportunity that it affords for analysing the nature of the print trade during a key phase of the so-called ‘print revolution’. Given the so-called ‘explosion’ of cheap print that accompanied the descent into civil war, and the vital role that print played in the political and religious turmoil of the revolutionary decades, it is vital to explore the role that stationers played, and to reflect upon their identities, not least in terms of the relationship between commercial motives and ideological imperatives. This chapter reconstructs and analyses the imprint of one such stationer, John Hammond, and explores his activity as both a commercial and a political actor. As such, it addresses the vital but vexed issue of the relationship between profit and politics in the world of early modern publishing.
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