For more than 400 years, the Stationers' Company has been a focus for the conduct of the print and book trade. Booksellers, stationers, printers, binders, other producers, and dealers united with a common purpose to protect their trade interests and to exert control in such matters as the number of master printers. In recent years, as the Company's archives have been opened up to researchers and as new evidence has come to light from other sources, the relationship of the Stationers' Company to the book trade as a whole has been shown to be more complex than had been previously imagined. The Stationers' Company, in all its aspects, is shown to be central to any study of book trade history in Britain.