Building on earlier accounts of print culture that consider its cultural work in puritan America, this essay considers where, how, and for whom print culture does and does not work. Informed by the “bummer theory” of print culture developed by Trish Loughran, Lara Cohen, and Jordan Stein, this account attempts to read slippages and silences alongside the familiar print performances of the era. Puritan print culture is inherently transatlantic, and understanding the affordances and obstacles presented by having this big, wet, and cold barrier between authors, presses, and audiences is crucial to understanding the vagaries of print for writers and readers in this era. Beyond physical barriers, there are also considerable social and cultural barriers, barriers that serve as a filter which produces the overwhelmingly orthodox, male, and white corpus of print that constitutes a major portion of the archive of puritan settlement. Finally, this essay considers the affordances and obstacles in place today that shape which puritan texts are available where and to whom.