John Benson (publisher)

John Benson (died 23 January 1667) was a London publisher of the middle seventeenth century, best remembered for a historically important publication of the Sonnets and miscellaneous poems of William Shakespeare in 1640.

[1] John Benson began his career as a stationer in 1635; he maintained shops in Chancery Lane (from 1635 on) and St. Dunstan's Churchyard in Fleet Street (1640 and after).

In his publishing career, Benson generally concentrated on the lower end of the market for printed matter in his era; he "specialized in the publication of ballads and broadsides.

(Since Thomas Thorpe, the original publisher of the Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint, had died c. 1635, his copyright to the material was likely considered lapsed.)

Benson is notorious for rearranging the order of the sonnets into groups, which he presented as complete poems, for which he invented titles.