In 1629, emboldened to believe that “Our books may come to be seen where ourselves shall never be heard,” Thomas Adams, London preacher, published his “Workes,” a massive folio which brought together the sermons, meditations, and “other divine and moral discourses” of seventeen years.1 “You see I have venturously trafficked with my poor talent in public,” he says in his preface. “If the grain be good, it doth better in the market than in the garner…. If it were profitable being spoken, sure it cannot be unnecessary being written.” The only other work to appear during his lifetime was a lengthy but close-reasoned “Exposition upon the Second Epistle General of St. Peter,” an epistle which he considered “a magnificent and beautiful structure” having “many a column of comfort, many a door of hope, many a window of light.”