At the first Annual General Meeting it was reported that "the printer is fast progressing with our first volume, which we hope to have ready for delivery to Members in the course of a very few weeks." In so reporting, Larking was being more hopeful than truthful. He did, indeed, attach the utmost importance to the quality and regularity of the Society’s publication, and, doubling the roles of Secretary and Editor, he had already sent a certain amount of material (probably in the main his own) to be set up. But, for one reason and another, a year was to go by before the first volume appeared. In September, 1858, Larking was given the assistance of an Editorial Committee, consisting of the Marquess Camden, Beresford Hope, Duffus Hardy (of the Public Record Office), and the Rev. J. S. Brewer (Professor of History at King’s College, London, and Reader at the Rolls Chapel). Brewer wrote the Introduction, which appeared anonymously in Volume I of Archaeologia Cantiana; evidently it was regarded as rather too flowery, even by mid-nineteenth century standards, and the most highly empurpled passages were excised by his fellow committee men. Larking, in writing to the other members of the Committee, calls it Brewer’s "beautiful preface," adding (surely with just a touch of scholarly sarcasm?) perhaps "we should draw his attention to a few oversights in the exuberance of his eloquence". But, apart from Brewer’s introduction, and a decision that the volume should be 

bound in cloth, preferably Kentish grey in colour (a decision which later had to be modified in favour of purple), Larking seems not to have had much active help from the Editorial Committee, and the work of seeing the volume through the press fell almost entirely upon him. On 22nd November, 1858, he was cheerfully promising publication before Christmas, although three days later he was still sending some of his own copy to the printer. Then, at the end of November, the printer decided to equip himself with a new fount of type "and set up all again".
   Not only were there problems with the printer. The Editorial Committee decided that, to strike the right note, the volume should open, on the frontispiece page, with the apt quotation from Bacon’s De Augmentis, which has appeared in every subsequent volume. As a concession to members with little Latin an English translation was to be appended, but here difficulties occurred, for the members of the Editorial Committee questioned the accuracy of each other’s translations, and I judge the exchanges on the subject to have been a little tart. Larking, with his customary resource and desire to prevent trouble, solved this problem by proposing that Bacon’s ipsissima verba from the parallel passage in The Advancement of Learning should be included, so avoiding any need for a translation of the Latin, a practice which every subsequent Editor has followed.

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