This article presents the poetic and epistolary corpus of François Maynard as a case study for understanding public and private spaces for reading and writing in the seventeenth century, with particular reference to notions of the cabinet as a physical, social, and literary space.It considers Maynard’s poems as personal gifts, published texts in collective anthologies, and texts circulated in manuscript form among a variety of readers.This study demonstrates the fluid boundaries that often existed between public and private literary spheres in the proliferation of poetry at this time, and argues that in Maynard’s case, the division between public and private readership depended less upon the number of readers of a text or the ease with which a text could be obtained, and more upon the control that he was able to maintain over the text as a physical object.