The title-page framing A Gorgious Gallery, of Gallant Inventions sets in play an architectural metaphor of the book that imagines this poetry anthology as a type of building (Figure 1). It is an apt place to begin, since the title-page’s self-reflexive exposition of the spatiality of the book brings into focus the materiality of literary culture, a field of enquiry that has preoccupied early modern scholarship over past decades and informs this study. If we cast our eyes down the title-page, attention shifts from metaphors describing the book-as-artefact to those accounting for the processes of making. ‘First framed and fashioned in sundrie formes’ by skilled artisans, ‘divers worthy workemen’ over time, this Gorgious Gallery has now been ‘joyned together and builded up’ in the anthology offered to its readers. On display is a language of poetic craft that is thoroughly grounded in the artisanal worlds of the sixteenth century. It is this understanding of craft that directs my account of the poetry anthologies that were made – and remade – in the second half of the sixteenth century in England, a period when the book trade was framing and fashioning an array of textual material in response to diverse and expanding markets for vernacular literature. The word ‘craft’ in the medieval and early modern period was semantically rich, bringing together imaginative, material, and technical processes with crafted objects, human agents, and the trades. All books are crafted, and yet, because poetry anthologies are, by definition, compiled, they necessarily foreground the processes through which they are ‘joyned together and builded up’. Craft is integral to understanding the work of form in printed anthologies. It explains how the gathering, selecting, and conjoining of lyric material was an embodied practice that required manual work, technical skill, and literary judgement. Methods for compiling textual material were, of course, skills taught in Renaissance schoolrooms and underpinned humanist culture, from the assembly of commonplace books to practices of imitation. Printed poetry anthologies provide an opportunity to understand how humanist methods for compiling books were adopted and adapted within the milieu of the printing house.