Thomas Hacket and the Ventures of an Elizabethan Publisher

This essay considers the life and career of Thomas Hacket, bookseller who worked in London between 1556 and 1590. Along with publishing a number of his own translations, Hacket financed many significant texts during his three decades as a stationer: among them, the first English translation of Ovid's Narcissus myth, the earliest edition of an English comedy, Thomas Nash's initial foray into print, and some of the first accounts of the Americas to be published in England. Hacket's career underscores the mediating potential, as translators, as compilers, as editors, and as patrons, of many early-modern publishers. It also affords insight into specialization and collaboration as fundamental practices in the speculative side of the early-modern book trade. As an active publisher in a burgeoning market of printed texts, Hacket –with men like John Day, Richard Jones, John Wolfe and others – made a distinct contribution to what was the unprecedented growth of English culture and letters in the sixteenth century.