Like other members of his class, Oxford was the frequent dedicatee of printed books. Most of the dedications attracted by Oxford were for translations, including the first four: three of ancient histories, one of Calvin's commentary on the Psalms:

Oxford's uncle Arthur Golding dedicated two of these four. Underdowne's dedication in Æthiopian Historie embodies an oddly characteristic message discouraging the young Earl from intellectual pursuits:

An imprint from 1571, Bartholomew Clerke's De Curiali, translated into Latin from Baldassare Castiglione's original Italian (STC 4782), is dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, but contains a kind of secondary dedication to Thomas Sackville, and letters of compliment to the author from, among others, Sackville and Oxford. The latter, as we have seen, is taken by Gabriel Harvey to have been Oxford's original composition. It is replete with predictable and characteristically repetitive literary observations.

A fifth translation, published in 1573, has also been noted already: Cardanus Comforte, Englished by Thomas Bedingfield (STC 4608). In the same year appeared a sixth translation, Humphrey Llwyd's The Breuiary of Britayne (STC 16636), rendered from the Latin by ‘Thomas Twyne, Gentleman’, with a dedication to Oxford on the grounds that ‘your honour taketh singular delight’ in ‘bookes of Geographie, Histories, and other good learnynge’. (Twyne was among the hysterics who would compose pamphlets on the earthquake of 6 April 1580.)

In 1574 appeared the first book dedicated to Oxford which is not merely a translation: his surgeon George Baker's The Composition or Making of the … Oil called Oleum Magistrale (STC 1209).