This is a book about early modern book history and race. Thus far, book history and critical race studies have been two very different scholarly activities. Scholarship in the history of the book has given us a rich account of the materiality of early modern texts. The concept of the “sociology of the text” has encouraged us to follow the material life-cycle of texts through the process that began with the making of ink and paper and ended with the printing, sale, and binding of volumes that readers then annotated with their own pens and ink, often beginning a new process of production and consumption. While this approach has produced an exciting and influential body of scholarship, book history has had less to say about the history of human identity that such texts record and create. In particular, book history has not focused on cultural categories such as race primarily because scholarship has assumed a divide between the form of books (their material state, which is part of book history) and their content (which is generally not).