The present discussion, like its predecessor on importation, is based on a sample of over 4,300 printed books which bear clear evidence of having been in private ownership in Britain before 1557. (For a sample of ownership inscriptions, see figs. 9.1–9.5, 21.1, 24.4, 25.1.) The same caveats as before apply in interpreting the data: the sample includes only surviving books (with factors such as size and subsequent custody influencing survival), and it is biased towards incunabula and perhaps towards books owned by the university-educated, and thus towards Latin books. Even with these limitations, however, the sample, as the largest so far assembled from individual instances, permits a broad view of book ownership among the literate population of the period. Concerned with private ownership of books, it excludes contemporary institutional libraries. Within these restrictions we can examine who owned books, what books they owned and what factors influenced that ownership.

Apart from availability, the primary factors influencing book ownership were need and means. Thus, the chief owners of books were university-educated and university educators, that is to say, the secular and regular clergy, including theologians, and other professionals such as lawyers and doctors. Merchants and gentry may not have had a need of books as easily defined as that of other groups, but they certainly had the means to acquire books, and they did. A number of these, and other, categories of reader are specifically examined elsewhere in this volume.