The first conference will be held at Queen Mary, University of London, from Friday September 1 to Sunday 3, 2006. One theme of the seminar will be the financing, production, and politics of religious publications in the Jacobean period, a theme to which the organisers plan to contribute. This will not by any means be the exclusive or indeed the main focus of the seminar. We want to cast the net wide to draw in comparative studies, e.g. Continental publishing in the period, or British printing immediately before and after the Jacobean period, studies of the relationship between printed book and manuscript; analytical-bibliographical work, and studies of book-historical method; the politics and economics of book production; and, in short, any new or ground-breaking work that sheds light on the history of the early-modern book and book trade.