The introduction reviews scholarly literature concerning David Garrick’s dual roles as actor and manager, and contends that narrative biography tends to reinforce a narrative of Garrick’s exceptional talent and fame as an actor-manager. Reading eighteenth-century newspapers and other contemporary media and revealing the mechanisms of publicity uncovers the methods used to create Garrick’s celebrity, and exposes his complicity in this process. The introduction concludes with a chapter outline and an explication of the research corpus and the study’s methodology. The methodology combines elements of distant reading in the digital newspaper archives with archival research into contemporary media and ephemera, book history and modern marketing and media studies.