Scholars of book history and early modern English literature have long affirmed and debated the impact of printing technology on culture. They often invoke exemplary claims and concepts, such as John Foxe’s portrayal of the press as a divine gift or Francis Bacon’s grand statement that the press, along with gunpowder and the magnetic compass, would remake the world and produce modernity. This conventional knack for working from illustrative examples requires a certain imaginative extrapolation, by which canonical writers speak for all of English culture.Rejecting extrapolation and exemplarity in favor of expansiveness and inclusivity, this book is the first to explore the lexicon of the book in rigorous detail and to describe its transformative power. How the World Became a Book in Shakespeare’s England asks, how did the widespread vocabulary of books, printing, and related text technologies (e.g., paper, ink, and letters) shape the way people think about the world? How did the shared rhetoric of books become a reflex of the imagination? If it is true that the press jump-started the modern era, what were the extent and qualities of that impact? This study looks not only to the material records but also to the linguistic and rhetorical ones. It traces how the descriptive codes emerging from printed books, which were themselves gathered from the figurative and material terms of other languages and earlier cultures, fostered ways of thinking and, in turn, gave writers language to negotiate their responses to the print medium. Instead of debating how the world became modern, this book shows how it became bookish.