In his 1594 ‘discourse of apparitions’, The terrors of the night, Thomas Nashe declared: ‘Gentlemen (according to the laudable custom), I am to court you with a few premisses considered: but a number of you there bee, who consider neither premisses nor conclusions, but piteouslie torment Title Pages on euerie poast, neuer reading farther of anie Booke, than Imprinted by Simeon such a signe’. In this chapter, I want to declare myself as one of the ‘bad’ readers Nashe decries, progressing no further than ‘Simeon such a signe’, and asking what challenges of reading and interpretation reside in the limited space of the early modern imprint: the text at the bottom of the title-page which gives details of a book’s printer, bookseller, and sometimes place of sale. These paratexts, I argue, operate within generic conventions, which, read carefully, reveal imprints to be fictive engagements with a surprising range of literary and cultural concerns. As Lotte Hellinga observes of the colophon from which it evolved, the imprint, which may seem to be merely ‘a statement appended to a text giving particulars about its genesis or production, is a text in its own right, and is therefore open to interpretation according to the time, place and circumstances of its origin’.