ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the barely known genre of the printer–author dialogue. The first section contextualises these texts against the bigger picture of dialogues about the book trade. I then focus on Robert Copland’s dialogues in The Seuen Sorowes That Women Haue When Theyr Husbandes Be Deade (1526) and William Neville’s Castell of Pleasure (1518), before turning to Thomas Blague’s A Schole of Wise Conceytes (1566). I argue that the printer–author dialogues offer unique insight into the development of the printer as a fictional figure and that dialogue’s properties – metacommunication, debate, instruction – were particularly appealing to writers whose topic was printing.
