To reveal the sophisticated and nuanced calculus of English stationers, this chapter explores the recursive relationship between readers’ responses to printed herbals and the activities of the publishers who catered to them, as well as the shifting regulatory mechanisms that enabled stationers to navigate the amount of financial risk that herbal publication increasingly asked of them.

This chapter broadens Foucault’s ideas of the author-function to include such textual progenitors as stationers, printers, and booksellers. It argues that authorship is a mode of self-fashioning and highlights the ways that the sociology of truth demands that others recognize one’s authorial and expert claims over a knowledge domain like natural history. It explains why Adrian Johns’s concept of stationer “credit” is of limited use and why his conflation of plagiarism and piracy confuses two separate issues of impropriety that undergo radical changes in the sixteenth century. It suggests making a “bibliographic turn” to remedy Johns’s interpretation of Steven Shapin’s “social history” and better account for bibliographic scholarship.