This essay examines the extent to which women were engaged with early modern literary culture by tracing women printers, publishers, and booksellers, the female book trade professionals who have received little attention in traditional literary criticism. Ever since Virginia Woolf mused on the female absence in early modern literary history, feminist scholars have concentrated on finding women’s literary properties that have fallen into oblivion. Critical attention, however, has been disproportionately accorded extraordinary women authors and their literary achievements, a focus that has obliterated the literary contributions ordinary women made at important stages of textual production, transmission, and reception in early modern England. Finding these long-lost women and their material properties is a way to take into account the fuller range and scope of early modern women’s literary contribution. Paying attention to the role of women in the book trade requires us to think afresh what literature is, how to define women’s texts, and how to explain the material conditions that shaped women’s literary and cultural practices. It also asks us to rethink our own critical perspective and methodology so that we can address in a less biased way the histories of women and literature and of material culture. In this essay, I offer an analysis of the books produced by some prolific women in the sixteenth-century English book trade, such as Catherine van Ruremund, Elizabeth Pickering/Redman, Joan Orwin, and Joan Broome, who have received less attention than they deserve. Topics include: material and social conditions that influenced women’s involvement in the early modern book trade; genre and books produced by women and the social implications thereof; and the social networks in which women stationers were situated.