The first sixty or so pages cover The Bay Psalm Book of 1640, Roger Williams, and the wonderful Anne Bradstreet; there is an ample excerpt from Michael Wigglesworth's fine and somber "The Day of Doom" and, best of all, thirteen pages devoted to that early American original Edward Taylor whose "Upon a Spider Catching a Fly" and "Upon a Wasp Child [chilled] with Cold" are among the great poems in the anthology.

In this collection of major essays Amory explores the world of seventeenth and early eighteenth century books, including the classic "The trout and the Milk: An Ethnobibliographical Essay," commentaries on the Bay Psalm Book and Bibles in seventeenth-century Essex county, a study of a printer caught in the financial crossfire of Boston booksellers of the time, and surveys of printing, bookselling and librarianship in New England.

The reader is also left to wonder about its relationship to the Dictionary of North American Hymnology project sponsored by the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada, which catalogs the texts printed in nearly every major hymnal published in North America from the 1640 Bay Psalm Book to the late twentieth century.