Chapter XXIV

Industrial Conditions of the Past and their Relation to the Printer’s Problem To-Day

Introductory

At first sight, the conditions of industry in the past do not seem to have practical relation either to a knowledge of printing types or to the work which a printer has to do with them. This same objection, however, might be made to the historical study of type-forms; yet the deductions made from such a study have a practical bearing on the selection of material for to-day’s work. I propose to show that a knowledge of past industrial conditions is of like value. For over and above the eternal problem of how best to do our work, some ambitious beginners in printing have made a further problem of their own. These men, knowing little of economic and industrial history, have come to believe that the conditions under which a printer works now are somehow very different from conditions in the past, and that the reason men cannot do to-day what the early printers so splendidly did, is because to-day’s conditions are so entirely different.

It is natural that any one who desires to become something more than a commonplace printer should be beguiled by the romantic aspect of his art; and if he starts out with a false although conventional conception of “the good old times,” it is only because he has derived such views from pleasant papers, written by so-called “craftsmen,” concerning ancient guilds, the former unity of aim among workmen, the stimulating environment which surrounded them, and the ease with which masterpieces were thus produced. The statements of these romantic writers have little relation to facts, or their deductions much application to our problems now. Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Morris were long ago responsible for some of the harm done in this direction; and the disciples of the ideals of the one, and the imitators of the work of the other, have had time to do even more harm. There have been, indeed, many well-meaning persons—some are still with us—who have written, and also talked, in a manner very near to nonsense, about the advantages of working long ago—though the precise years of these agreeable periods are usually left dans le vague.

Such mistaken views have not been confined to writing and talking, but were sometimes acted upon. Theorists and sentimentalists here and there formed themselves into temporary industrial groups, fenced away from what they called the “corresponding influences” of the period to which they really belonged! These men thought (or said they did) that they were reproducing that tranquil and contented industrial life under which—in some Golden Age—good work was universally done. A little study of the economic history of printing, and of the life of printers in old times, would perhaps have convinced these amiable persons that—as far as typography was concerned—no such conditions existed. The Gothic scenes against which the old work was accomplished, made in some ways as little difference to it as does the shape of a room to the sense of what is said in it. What we think of as the printers’ foreground was usually their background, and the remoteness of the period should not lead us to idealize it, or them. When we throw away all this “bric-à-brac sentimentale et moyen-âgeux” we find that the constant element was the human will struggling against human laziness; and that the victory of the one or of the other made for success or failure then, precisely as it does now. When what they did was admirable—as it sometimes, but not always was—it was produced with travail. The pity of it is that much valuable enthusiasm, which might have been applied to present-day needs, has come to nothing through these false conceptions. Gilbert Murray says,

The chains of the mind are broken by understanding and so far as men are unduly enslaved by the past, it is by understanding the past that they may hope to be freed. But it is never really the past—the true past—that enslaves us; it is always the present.

II. Early Conditions in the French Printing Industry

The history of French type-founding, printing, and publishing is extremely “documented,” and I write of early industrial conditions in France because we can so readily get an idea of what they were at first in the printing industry and of what they subsequently became. To begin with, the men who copied manuscripts before printing was introduced were often extremely inaccurate transcribers. To establish some proper standard and supervision, they were placed under the control of the University of Paris. The University had the right to license proper copyists, and to approve the sale of their manuscripts—many of which were in the nature of text-books in which exactness was essential. To accomplish this, there was a great body of regulations in force. The copyists in France were an influential class—strong enough to prevent the setting up of a printing-press in Paris for fully twenty years after the invention of printing. Their opposition to the press shows us that industrial conflicts existed at the very birth of printing. Mellottée says that

documents of the period tell us of the frightful struggle of the manuscript-makers against the first printers. No improvements in our present-day machinery can be compared to the change which printing made in the production of books. And even the revolution at the beginning of the nineteenth century, brought about by the introduction of the power-press, is as nothing really, compared with the complete overturn which took place in industries connected with the book. In 1470, there were six thousand men occupied solely in transcribing manuscripts, and some years later they scarcely existed, the new process doing ten times more work than all of them together.1

Rome, Venic, Milan, Nuremberg, Cologne, Augburg, all had printing-presses before a Parisian press was set up; and when the first Paris press was established, it was in a sense a private affair and came into being only through the influence of scholars like Heynlin and Fichet of the Sorbonne. After a while the business men of that day saw the commercial advantage of such enterprises, and began to interest themselves in them. It was not, however, until about 1480 that printing was fairly established in Paris. Twenty years later, there were Parisian establishments which possessed as many as fifteen presses.

If we keep steadily in mind that the making of printed books was nothing more than the reproduction of manuscripts by mechanical means, we can better understand by what insensible steps the supervision of the University was transferred from the product of the copyists-by-hand (i.e., manuscripts) to the product of the copyists-by-machinemechanical-device (i.e., books). The copyists-by-hand former, after printing was introduced, had still some work to do on a printed book. In many cases they illuminated the first page, just as they had decorated the first page of the manuscript; and they still filled in paragraph marks, initials, etc., in colour. There was no abrupt transition from hand-copying to press-printing. Many men continued in the waning industry of calligraphy and illumination until they died; but their places were not filled. Others were at once forced into other occupations, and many became writing-master, some accountants. The same regulations that had been applied to the scribe and his manuscript were applied by Louis XI in 1474 to the printer and his book; the transition was accomplished, and the printer found himself attached to the University in place of the ancient copyists.

On the other hand, the examining and licensing prerogatives of the University, vested in a theological faculty, were one by one transferred to the King, an din the end it was to the Crown that the three grades of French printers—the apprentice, the journeyman, and the master-printer—had to look for such privileges as they enjoyed. The copyist had to look for such privileges as they enjoyed. The copyist having become a printer, and supervision having been slowly transferred from the University and from Parliament to the Crown—the chief result of sixteenth century legislation—we have to find out what were the conditions in the printing and publishing trade in France during this and succeeding centuries.

In the early days of French printing, there were three classes of printers: the apprentice, the journeyman, and the master-printer. To be a master-printer, a man had first to be a journeyman, and before being a journeyman he must have been an apprentice. Certain conditions had to be fulfilled before admission was grated to these different ranks. The rules which governed these positions descended to the printing trade from the ancient Corporation du Livre; and to this extent guild rules had some influence on printing. In the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries the guild or trade-union was really a safeguard to the artisan, we are told by Mellottée. The head of the atelier was in some sense a father; the workman lived under the same roof with him; in disputes he had a right of appeal; and he was backed by his guild or company as the cleric was by his bishop, or the student by his college. But this healthy and true form of paternalism was on the wane when printing was invented, and by the sixteenth century, although conditions appeared to be much as in former years, the guilds and similar associations had fallen into the hands of employers and become close corporations and monopolies. The interests of the two classes became more distinct, and finally were antagonistic. Whatever the guilds may have done for manuscript-makers, as far as they influenced printing at all they were not a particularly salutary force. For printing was a trade that required capital, encouraged subdivision of labour, and, to be profitable, had to employ workers in large numbers.

The first master-printers engaged their apprentices on various terms: sometimes paying in money only; sometimes undertaking to feed and lodge the apprentice, and to supply him with shoes during his stay—and at the end of his engagement to present him with an extra pair! The apprenticeship generally lasted three years. In 1571, apprenticeship became compulsory, and a master was obliged to certify that an apprentice had duly learned his trade under him, and was fitted to become a journeyman. The journeyman complained that stingy, ignorant master-printers turned out half-educated apprentices, and that thus the whole class of journeymen was discredited; and was a remedy they suggested that pressmen should serve four years’ and compositors five years’ apprenticeship—in any case three. Later it was insisted—what from the first would have seem desirable—that apprentices should know how to read and write! In 1649, the lines of qualification were much more tightly drawn, and apprentices were expected to know something of Greek and to be able to read Latin. The result was that so few apprentices applied for admission to printing-houses, that in 1654 master-printers were again allowed to engage apprentices who only knew how to read and write in the vernacular.

There was also an inferior sort of apprentice called an alloué. Nothing was asked of him except hard work. He had the same obligations as other apprentices, but when he had finished his apprenticeship, he was still a mere workman and not a journeyman. Journeymen could (if fitted for it) become master-printers; but the alloués could not. They first seem to have been recruited from the ranks of little boys, hewers of wood and drawers of water, who, because they were strong and willing, were useful in printing-offices and could be profitably employed. Later they arrived at the status we have described. They were an antique form of printers’ devil. Child-labour—male and female—is not new.

In those days of ancient peace there was really constant war between employer and employed over the apprentices—a struggle that began with the invention of printing and is scarcely terminated yet. The master-printer, to increase the number of journeymen, wished to be free to take as many apprentices as he pleased. The journeyman, on his side, wanted to reduce the number of apprentices so that the number of journeymen should be limited. A rule issued in 1541 has a significant clause to the effect that master may make and take as many apprentices as they choose, and that the journeymen must not beat or menace the said apprentices, but must work with them for the good of the trade, under pain of prison, banishment, and other punishments. It was this dispute that was one of the causes of industrial troubles which will be mentioned later.

The earliest French printing-offices were often very small affairs—ateliers de famille. They were conducted chiefly by foreigners, mostly Germans, whose common origin, employment in a foreign country, and the fact that books were usually in Latin, sometimes led to real community of interest and some intellectual culture among the workmen. But in the sixteenth century, men of means, principally publishers who were not themselves practical printers, organized printing-offices simply for the returns they got from them, just as we now organized manufactories and, I am sorry to say, printing-houses, which interest us only for the money they bring in. Then, as now, the disparity between the social and financial situation of the two classes forced men into several groups governed by opposing interests. As early as the year 1536, a master-printer had been sentenced for the bad food given to a journeyman, and the decree also censured him for what is styled “his unbridled avarice,” which made him care for nothing but getting rich, though he was reducing his journeymen and their families to objects of charity. When establishments came into existence which employed as many as two hundred and fifty workmen, the masters tried to reduce the rate of wages. To effect this, the number of apprentices was made as great as possible, for apprentices were paid less.

The type-founders legal situation was not,

up to 1685, very clear. They were not recognized as exercising any special trade, and they could not, as type-founders alone, become members of the Confrérie de St. Jean l’Évangéliste2 (a sort of guild-trade-union), or from 1618 become one of the Community of Printers and Publishers. This difficulty they got over by taking out permits, which allowed them to open shops and to call themselves publishers, or sometimes even paper-makers; but real publishers were not pleased at this, and instituted a suit in 1614 to forbid them to take this title.3

This quarrel lasted for a long time, and some thirty years later Richelieu’s favourite, Antoine Vitré, wrote that

Letter-founders call themselves publishers, printers and binders because they cast letters for books. I tell them that the calf has about as much right to call himself a publisher because he furnishes the skin for the bindings.

A decree of 1670 regulated the sale of new or second-hand typographic material, which was scrupulously looked after. No press and no font of type could be sold or exchanged without a declaration before the authorities, if it was to be used in Paris; or some special authorization, if sent to the provinces. The Crown took these measures to prevent the establishment of clandestine printing-offices, from which disquieting political pamphlets were often issued. Royal authority, enforced to the utmost through the censure, had by the end of the seventeenth century reduced the University to a negligible rôle in relation to printing. The regulation of the printing and publishing trade I shall touch upon later.

III. Some Sixteenth Century Labour Troubles

It may come as a surprise to the lover of ancient customs that among the picturesque habits of sixteenth century printers was that of going out on strikes. The printers’ strikes and resultant disturbances at Lyons and Paris lasted from 1539 to 1572. The Lyons strike was an explosion among the rank and file of the work-people, the outcome of a series of abuses suffered at the hands of the masters; for master-printers appear to have determined to reduce their subordinates to men without powers or rights. This Lyons strike had been brewing for a long time. In the months of April and May, 1539, a number of the Lyonnese printers stopped work, and also disorganized the labour of other journeymen and apprentices, threatening them if they dared to continue in their places. The sequel was a strike so general that the printing industry was at a standstill. Armed bands of strikers marched the streets day and night and attacked masters, police, and officers of the government; but among the workmen themselves excellent discipline reigned, showing that a perfectly good understanding existed, and had existed for some time, as to what was to be done by the labour party. The outgoing men pledged themselves not to work except in a body, and punished any one refusing to submit to the rules of their organization. The number of men in the labour group was so great that it was impossible to imprison them all, though here and there some workmen were arrested.

The cause of the strike, according to the workmen’s complaint, was that master-printers supplied insufficient food, that wages had been reduced, and that they were not free to do their work as, and when, they chose. The master retorted that there were certain classes of journeymen who were never contented with their food and never would be, and that there were always men who wished to take holidays on work-days and to work on holidays. But the number of holidays without pay was a positive evil then to the working-man, as they would be now, for he often needed to work at those times to support his family. On the chief festivals, naturally, no work was done, but there were multitudes of minor saints’ days to be observed, leaving only about two hundred and forty working days in the year.

The master were willing to compromise on these points, but the workmen would not accept their offers. Meanwhile the authorities of Lyons insisted upon some solution, for they had the strikers’ wives and children on their hands, many of them in real destitution. To settle matters, two committees (one composed of journeymen, the other of masters) appeared before the Seneschal of Lyons, who had authority from the Crown to settle the dispute. The seneschal’s decision shows on how many points the two groups differed. Journeymen were forbidden to take any pledge among themselves, together outside work-rooms in larger parties than five, to carry arms or sticks in printing-offices or the street, to threaten or beat apprentices or to interfere with them; they were also debarred from labour on festivals and from stopping work on the eves of festivals earlier than was customary, and were not allowed to leave work to go to a baptism or funeral unless it was in the family of their master or mistress! As to master-printers, they could take as many apprentices as they chose, but they must give the usual monthly wage to journeymen and must feed them properly, with as good food as they had customarily given give or six years before—a committee being appointed to decide wherein proper board and lodging consisted. In most of these stipulations journeymen were defeated and masters were triumphant; but the Seneschal of Lyons, in receiving a group of journeymen representing the workmen, inadvertently recognized the labour party. By this an admission was practically made that workmen had the right to act in a corporate capacity and to be represented before the authorities. The Crown, however, accepted the settlement of the dispute and made a decree which was mandatory, and the strike was ended. The government found itself face to face with organized labour, and it was so frightened thereby that the decrees which it put forth not alone regulated printing, but were to be applied in principle to every other trade in France.

The Lyons strike was a question of wages; the Paris strike concerned the conduct of employees. It was precipitated by complaints made by master-printers, who alleged that journeymen and their helpers, by private clubs and associations, had directly and indirectly stirred up dissatisfaction among apprentices, and had so influenced them as practically to destroy their usefulness. The masters drew up regulations which they wished the King to enforce, based on decisions given in the Lyons strike, and meant to forestall similar difficulties. These proposed rules debarred journeymen from forming any club or electing representatives, from assembling outside their master’s house, and from being armed; forbade them to beat apprentices; made masters arbiters of what journeymen should do and how and when they should do it; forbade assembling at dinners to celebrate the beginning or end of an apprenticeship and the asking of subscriptions for a common cause; forbade the use of the word “tric” (a signal used when work was to be stopped for a strike); forbade grumbling if work in a hurry should be distributed among a number of workmen; and prohibited them from absence on eves of festivals and from working on the feast-day itself. Masters were to give journeymen reasonable nourishment, pay them monthly, dismiss any who were mutinous or disreputable; were to insist on eight days’ notice before workmen could leave them (although they were not to give notice of dismissal to workmen); were not to hire away one another’s work-people, or use another’s printers’ devices. They were also obliged to have proofreaders who knew how to correct proofs properly. The working day was fixed from five o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock at night. Type-foundries were included in the preceding rules. The King approved the proposals and they became law. In Lyons, it was the journeymen who complained; in Paris, the masters saw an opportunity to secure more power by precipitating questions which forestalled like complaints. In August, 1539, when the law was promulgated, the Paris strike began. The disturbances which it caused were not settled by the Crown until thirty years later—in 1572, by a compromise which was satisfactory neither to the employers nor the employed.

Meanwhile, at Lyons the printing industry was ruined. The master-printers decided to leave for the city of Vienne in Dauphiny, or some other place where conditions were better. The Lyons authorities, frightened at the removal of an industry and invested capital which would hurt the prosperity of the town (for next to Paris, Lyons was the great centre for printing), met the masters and endeavoured to find some way out of the difficulty. An appeal was made to the King, who finally modified the laws in effect at Lyons, in accord with the rulings which had been enforced at Paris; but it was only after some years of negotiation that the matter was finally settled, and then only by royal authority. It is recorded that among the many master-printers of Lyons, Étienne Dolet, the author-printer-bookseller, alone sided with the workmen, and incurred, by so doing, the lasting hostility of other master-printers—a hostility which had something to do with the troubles to which he later fell victim. Dolet, who had been proofreader for Gryphius, and was friend to Jean de Tournes, was hanged at Paris in 1546 for heretical opinions, and his body and books burned together.

These are but two episodes in the history of printing trade in France during the sixteenth century. Conditions were probably the same in greater or less degree in England, Holland, Germany, and Italy. At any rate, enough has been said to show how very like the industrial conditions were then to those we know now. Some of the details seem very modern; and yet Aldus had been dead only about twenty years when these strikes began, and the Aldine Office still existed and was to exist for years to come.

IV. Printing at Paris in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

We have seen what French industrial conditions were in the sixteenth century. At the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, what was the condition of printing at Paris?

There was a certain Pierre Jacques Blondel who, about 1724, wrote a sarcastic memoir on Parisian booksellers and printers,4 which, though not, perhaps, to be taken too seriously, casts light upon the situation at that time. It is amusing to find the writer begin, as we are apt to do to-day, by telling about the wonderful old times of long ago. In the happy days of François I, he says, wistfully, there were men like the Estiennes,5 the De Colines, Vascosans, Morels, and others who were “all men of letters, clever in their profession and much more anxious to perfect their art than to make immense fortunes.” And then Blondel goes on to speak of the Camusats, the Vitrés, and the Cramoisys as men who, if not so learned, were at least of respectable standing; capable, as he quaintly says, of “consoling the Republic of Letters for the loss of the first group of printers.” Here we have two sets of men. Note that the first class, who lived two hundred years before Blondel wrote, were perfect prodigies of learning, while the second group, living nearer to Blondel’s time, though less learned were still acceptable. Blondel says,

But, into what decadence has this important art fallen in our day, especially in Paris! What a gap there is between the printers that I named and those who mix themselves up in printing now and who degrade a noble art by the meanest manoeuvres!… The earliest printers were industrious, they applied themselves to their profession, they were versed in belles-lettres and the learned tongues. To-day, printers are men occupied solely in gain or amusement, without special knowledge and for the greater part without general education—as we say, ignorant and unlettered men… If some of them went to college in their youth, they brought away but a mere smattering of learning,…and the rest are simply tradesmen who have made their fortune in second-hand books and who began their career in situations so very different from their present calling that it is a wonder they are printers at all! They are printers, not because of, but in spite of literature and men of learning; and furthermore, are rich printers, which educated men will never be.

While Blondel is ready to admit that there are two or three persons in the profession at his own period who can be respected, he thinks that most of the are mainly supported by a bibliomania encouraged by financial magnates, who are in turn actuated more by vanity than by taste or intelligence. He proceeds to describe the annoyances suffered by the public, the authors, and last of all by the workmen themselves.

The privileges which the king accorded for the printing of books (to the thirty-six printers fixed by law by the edict of 1686), Blondel reminds us, expressly stipulated that books should be printed on good paper and from good type, and if they were not, the privilege became null and void. Printers and booksellers, however, now sold books of importance printed on wretched paper, from battered types, carelessly corrected—all to avoid expense. If the public complained, it complained without redress. Moreri’s historical dictionary6 could not be bound properly, because the ink was so poor that it offset upon opposite pages, and some books were so carelessly printed that whole lines of text were left out. Greek characters were used which were so worn that the accents could not be distinguished. Booksellers, who had to obtain a license for each new edition of a book, evaded this requirement by omitting the number of the edition on the title-page, or by placing old dates on new editions. The English at that period had a method of publishing works by subscription—a number of subscribers clubbing together to finance the expense of a book, each subscriber receiving copies of the edition so published at a lower price than outsiders. The French publisher took up his scheme and improved upon it. He secured the subscribers’ money in advance and this furnished the chief part of the capital necessary for the enterprise; and though subscribers got their books cheaper than outsiders, yet they paid exorbitantly for them. Nor did the publisher, having received the subscriptions, hurry to issue the book. As long as it was ultimately printed, he thought it “did just as well”; and should any subscriber venture to suggest that the work ought to appear, his subscription would be haughtily returned. Blondel says humorously, that if all the subscribers had only asked for the return of the subscriptions, somebody would have been much embarrassed! Again, when the public complained that books cost a great deal, the publisher said that the paper was dear, that workmen insisted on enormous wages,—though workmen were really scandalously underpaid,—and that, after all, it was merely to keep business going that they printed at all; they would willingly shut up shop, for all the profit they got out of it! But in spite of all this, no less a person than Jean Baptiste Coignard II,7 who with Denis Mariette printed Moreri’s dictionary, boasted that every time he published an edition he was able to marry off a daughter with a comfortable dowry. Some pious individuals, who wished to publish religious books at their own expense, to be distributed gratis among the poor, or sold at a small price to those in modest circumstances, were astonished to find, after these works of edification had been delivered to them and paid for, that before they could be distributed they were seized by booksellers as about to be illegally sold without a license. Those who seized them then sold them a second time for their own benefit.

The master-printers of an older day had the reputation of attracting educated men, whom they treated “with some consideration and not like convicts.” But master-printers of Blondel’s epoch had arrived at their position, as have seen, not by knowledge or experience, but by favouritism and money. In other trades, masters directed their apprentices, but here it is the apprentices who directed their masters. Masters were not only ignorant, but absolutely incapable of working at the calling of which they were ostensibly the heads. They had been, most of them, neither apprentices nor journeymen, but simply moneyed men,—or sons of prosperous booksellers,—who looked at the whole affair as trade, and who set up a printing-office because they thought they were rich enough to make it succeed. Workmen had from time to time brought complains to Parliament, and masters had been forbidden by its decrees to harass them or to require that workmen who wished to change their place of employment must carry letters of recommendation from the old to the new master—a plan which, the authorities perceived, reduced workmen

to a servitude from which the commonest servant in France in exempt, because he is at least permitted to change his place if he wishes.

Then, again, master-printers had so influenced legislation, that when workmen tried to get justice, they found themselves forbidden by law to act in a collective capacity, and consequently could not legally complain collectively before any tribunal. The men’s wages were arbitrated at a sort of board of trade, and were often determined by persons who knew nothing about typography or how much should be given to the printer for each page he composed. Blondel says,

You might as well have the tailors tell the cloth-makers what wages they should pay their employees…in fact, a great deal better, because the tailors are far more conversant with the qualities of cloth than are publishers with printing and paper. All they know is (as Harlequin said) that the white is the paper and the black is the print.

If any workman complained of the insufficient wages, he was called mutinous, seditious, and dissipated; and yet, according to the statistics of the period, among six hundred journeymen printers in Paris, there were very few who led loose lives; and Blondel adds sarcastically that

the extremely small wages which they received were not capable of furnishing the means for very serious dissipation!

That the labourer is worthy of his hire, Blondel reminds his readers, is a precept of the Gospel; but the Gospel did not interest Parisian booksellers—unless it was to be printed.

If an author was in a hurry to get his book finished, but some new work of a more important and paying sort came to the printing-office, work-people were taken off the book the author was clamouring for, and were compelled to stay all night working on the more profitable job that had to be printed quickly. If an author complained that his book did not get on fast enough, what was the reply? It was that printers were dissipated, and that, of course, was not the fault of the publisher!

Too well-known Paris publishers and printers, Barbou8 and David,9 “as stingy as they were unprincipled,” says Blondel, employed a publisher who had correspondents in various countries to secure printers from Germany, whom they would engage to pay three livres a day, together with washing, lodging, and food. Eight German workmen, on the strength of the publisher’s letter (which, unfortunately for them, they left behind at Frankfort), accepted the offer. Six of them went to Barbou, two to David. They all worked exactly three days. Then Barbou said he was not finished, because the men were Germans did not know French; also he alleged that they did not work in the Parisian, but in the German method—which (at this late period) appears to us natural. He would consent to keep them, he declared, only at two livres daily to include everything and on condition they would engage to stay with him for three years. The men refused, saying that living was dear in Paris, they were accustomed to a good table, and they could not afford to stay at the wages offered. So Barbou locked them up in his printing-office without food, and there they remained until they made so much noise that he was shamed into setting them free. When the men tried to return to Germany, the masters held back their luggage. Their French comrades, angry at such scurvy treatment of strangers, made up a purse and sent them home. This the master-printers considered insulting and insupportable to the last degree, and described as an attitude of open revolt.

At that day, there were six hundred printers in Paris, and great opposition was made to bringing in foreigners at all. Blondel says,

Why should people import labour? What injustice is it to hire abroad people who take the bread out of the hands of the French workmen.

Little the masters cared whether their men were foreign or native, learned or ignorant! He adds,

They judged their qualifications by their own and as many of the master-printers hardly know how to read, they are absurd enough to suppose that it is not necessary to know more, in order to be capable of correctly producing Greek, Latin, French, and scientific works.… If this sort of thing goes on, they will make negroes come to work at printing, as they employ them in the Indies to produce indigo and sugar.

But Parisian publishers in these sad, bad old times, did not worry as to whether the books they printed were correct, or well produced, provided they could sell them at a high price. Illustrated Bibles had been printed a hundred years earlier which were cheaply and tastefully brought out, but new editions—sold at a high price—contained plates disgraceful in their slovenly execution. Editions of poetry were issued, badly printed, wretchedly composed, with pages swarming with faults of spelling and punctuation. Absurd errors, the correction of which was absolutely essential, were passed over. In a book of prayers for the use of lay-people, a passage in St. Matthew was made to read non timebis Dominum instead of non tentabis, and a missal, the Canon of the Mass lacked a word.

Blondel continues,

Instead of keeping the loyalty of their workmen by fair wages inciting honest endeavour, the master-printers hold them only to persecute them, to decry their value, and to enviously snatch the very bread from their hands. Was there ever such terrible oppression! Slaves at Algiers do not fare worse. Is n’t this precisely the way to disgust decently educated men, as journeymen ought to be, with such an ungrateful employment?… If matters go on in this way, and a deaf ear is persistently turned to complaints, they will flee a country where they groan under oppression.… It is not to scandalize people, that this memoire is written; it is to end a violence so tyrannical that there is no way of opposing it save to cry loudly: Stop thief!

The tone of much of this is disconcertingly modern. The introduction of the ill-paid and inexperienced foreign workman, the oppression of the helpless labourer, the objection to his forming any corporate opposing body, the association of employers to determine the wages to be paid, the statement that books were dear because the workmen received such large returns—all these things are familiar to us. Our own troubles to-day are only repetitions of these old tumults: no more bitter, but on a greater scale.

Blondel’s memoir was satirical,—and intentionally so,—but it stated facts and reflected the general opinion upon conditions among booksellers and printers in Paris in the last years of the seventeenth century and the first quarter of the eighteenth. It made some noise, and (as was intended) aroused the authorities, who spent much time in trying to find out who wrote it and where it was printed. As a result, some real reforms were effected. Publishers were obliged to submit to regulations which required the use of better paper and greater correctness in printing, and in the matter of subscription books they were held to stricter standards.

V. The Censorship

The censorship of books and its later development were further handicaps under which printers of old times had to work—for freedom was first allowed to the press in France in 1789. The inspection of the book-trade under the kings of France was extremely severe, and imposed a strict surveillance upon every conceivable aspect of the printer’s and bookseller’s business, and a drastic censorship of all printed books. It was forbidden, under pain of punishment and finds, for any private persons, except master-printers, to have or to keep in any place whatsoever, or under any pretext, any press, type, forms, or printer’s tools; and to every one except the bookselling publishers, to take part in the commerce, sale, or purchase of books. All works printed without permission were taken from those who were at fault, and in case they contained anything contrary to religion, the King, the State, or public morality, the authors, printers, and publishers who had written, printed, or sold such books could be condemned and punished as disturbers of the public peace; while the printers, booksellers, and peddlers could be degraded from their trade and declared incapable of exercising it. Type-founders were not permitted to deliver fonts of types to any one except master-printers, or their widows carrying on the business; nor could they sell to any one save masters in the trade, printers, and booksellers, in large or small quantities, their punches, strikes, and matrices. The quartier de l’Université on the left bank of the Seine, in which printers were obliged to live and work, was exactly marked in its limits, and non-residence there was punished by loss of outfit and sometimes by deprivation of privilege.

The oversight of all this was exercised by different classes of police inspectors. One of the eighteenth century officials, d’Hémery, who became the general inspector of the whole bookselling community, was authorized to make visits to any bookseller or printer whom he chose to see, either by night or by day, and to have an account given of anything that he happened to find, about which he wished to learn. He considered it necessary to know the precise number of presses and the amount of type in every printing-office, and to possess proofs of all vignettes and ornamental letters. Founders were not to be allowed, without his consent, to deliver fonts of type without giving him a declaration of their number, weight, and kind, and the names of those to whom they were to be sold. He even expected a list of all the apprentices in Paris, to whom he wished to furnish tickets of ingress and egress for the particular printing-office in which they were employed. The power that he asked for was not fully granted; but it indicates an agreeable conception of his own sphere of labour!

It would seem logical that the author should be held responsible for his ideas rather than the printer; but in early times, the printer suffered and the author often went free. Mellottée tells us that this was due to the theory that the printer provided the author with the means of promulgating the error in his works, and that it was not attacks upon religion or existing institutions that were thought dangerous, but rather the popularization of such attacks; in other words, the fact that they were printed and widely distributed. In the Middle Ages, before the invention of printing, there had been many philosophers with heretical ideas, but they had been quickly stifled by the Church or the Crown. All this was quite different after the invention of printing. Such people no longer merely addressed an assembly of a few hundred individuals, but could b make their appeal to an entire people, and printing being the only means which could give such power to though, repressive legislation fell upon printers rather than upon authors. It was for this reason that such severe and rigorous penalties were inflicted in support of the censorship of the press; for the men of the sixteenth century were so frightened at what appeared to them its incalculable power, that they took extreme measures to counteract this new force. Besides confiscation and degradation, the ordinary punishments were imprisonment, whipping, or banishment, and capital punishment was not uncommon. These pains and penalties were not alone applicable to printers because they produced dangerous publications, but even to people who merely neglected to take out proper authorization for otherwise harmless work. In 1547, punishment by death was proclaimed against all printers who published a book without the imprimatur of the faculty of theology of Paris. It was not only in the sixteenth century that death was meted out to printers, but as late as 1757, the declaration was made by the civil power that all persons who were convicted of having composed or printed works tending to attack religion, to disturb the public mind, or against royal authority, or the order and security of the government, were punishable by death. It is true that judges avoided these extreme measures as far as they could; but from 1660 to 1756, less than a century, eight hundred and ninety-six authors, printers, and sellers of books, prints, and pictures were arrested and imprisoned in the Bastille for having published works contrary to good manners, religion, or the Crown. A third of these men were printers. In addition to the more sever punishments mentioned above was the public burning of volumes at the hands of the hangman—the author himself being occasionally added as kindling to the flames, as in the case of Dolet. This charming custom was practised during the happy days of the manuscript-makers, and, as far as printing is concerned, was merely the survival of a picturesque old-world ceremony applied to a new form of industry.10

It was much the same all over Europe. In the Netherlands, for instance, edicts were enforced by Charles V and Philip II against printers who purchased or sold books favourable to the Reformation; and in the sixteenth century, Plantin was granted the post of proto-typographer, which empowered him to examine all candidates for the printer’s and engraver’s trades. Among requisite letters which a printer must produce was a certificate from his diocesan authorities that he was of the orthodox faith, while the magistrate of the district bore witness to his good reputation. The number of apprentices in his employ—if he was a master-printer—had to be stated. Proofreaders had to give certificates of birth, parentage, places of education and training, and good reputation as Roman Catholics, prior to an examination of their skill. Registers were kept, in which titles of the books printed and other particulars had to be inscribed. Imported books were subject to examination, and any sold in Antwerp had to be recorded. Houses in which heretical books had been printed were abbatues et ruynées par terre!11 quite in the modern German manner.

VI. The Rate of Production, House of Labour, etc.

As to production—in 1571, three hundred to five hundred sheets a day was considered a good output, but in 1654, it was twenty-seven hundred; and in 1650, twenty-five hundred was the rule. These were for sheets printed in black, but twenty-two hundred was considered enough if red was also used. These sheets were printed by hand on a screw-press. Such requirements put to flight our pleasant idea that work in the old days had none of the rush about it that is has now.

Hours of work for foremen, workers by the day, and workers by the piece, were from six o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock at night in summer; and in winter, from seven in the morning until nine o’clock. This was in the eighteenth century. But agitation by work-people about the length of the working day began as early as the fourteenth century, and was neither the child of the French Revolution, nor the offspring of modern socialism. In 1395, shorter hours, with the same wages given for a longer working day, was a practical question. The Lyons printers complained in 1571 that their day began at two in the morning and lasted until eight or nine in the evening; and this for printers does not seem to have been unusual. Night work, as such, it is true, was forbidden,—although most persons do not much differentiate between 2 a.m. and night—not because it was bad for the workman, but, among other less creditable reasons, because the danger from fire was great and because the flickering lights of the period did not permit men to do justice to their tasks. In England, the working hours varied in different trades, and at different places and periods. Even as late as the middle of the nineteenth century, the ordinary working hours of the printer were unlimited—though nominally from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.—in such excellent London printing-houses as that of the Spottiswoodes.

If economic conditions are not kept in mind, we misunderstand the significance of certain historical facts, and twist them to fit some fantastic theory. For instance, people talk loosely about great printing dynasties like Estiennes, Elzevirs, Plantin-Moretus, etc., where generations of the same family succeeded each other as printers. This was caused to some extent, no doubt, by interest in and attachment to the work; but it was also due to an economic reason. The amount to be had by the sale of the equipment of a printing-house was, in our time, by no means commensurate with the money value of the business if it could be carried on. That was the chief reason why large printing-offices were continued by one family, or by a long succession of partners. We know, too, that in early times the widows and daughters of master-printers were in great demand, because when a qualified journeyman married the widow or daughter of a master-printer, he acquired privileges facilitating his reception as a master. And this was another of the causes for great printing families—which we like to style “printing dynasties” if it all happened long enough ago! It was more commonplace and simpler—more reasonable—than we think.

Nor were women in the bad old times permitted to lead peaceable lives, occupied by the cradle and the distaff. From the time of St. Louis, women were employed in trades reserved for them—we find records of their names and occupations as early as 1296. Quite apart from learned ladies like Charlotte Guillard, who printed and published her famous Greek and Latin editions of Fathers in the sixteenth century, women were very early employed in the humbler branches of typography, and women have been in our composing-rooms almost ever since. Like child-labour, it is nothing new; very few industrial “novelties” are!

VII. Conclusion

There is, therefore, little excuse for thinking that conditions of labour to-day are very different from those that long preceded the; and it is important to realize that these conditions were all along factors, as they are now, in the problem of turning out good printing. Types and books reflect the state of the arts around them, because on one side typography is an art; but they are influence by trade conditions, because it is also a trade. Not to face these two facts or to neglect either one or the other, is merely to fool one’s self!

To make a book which should look like a manuscript, and indeed counterfeit it, was what the first printers tried to do. They wished to reproduce the manuscript of commerce as nearly as they could, and they did it by imitating such manuscripts in type. It was an effort to make cheaply what had before been made expensively. Incidentally, they imitated beautiful written books, but there is no proof that their printed books were always consciously intended to be beautiful.

All along, the changes in books were influenced by commercial conditions. The first books were folios—large and dear. What did the printer to? He produced books which were small and cheap, and we have the Aldine 16mo volumes, printed in italic (a letter adopted chiefly because it was compact), for their period perfectly commercial though attractive editions. Again, Pigouchet and Vérard at Paris printed their Books of Hours, and they were very charming volumes. They were not as charming as the manuscripts from which they were copied, but they were far, far cheaper. By and by, when printers discovered the ignorance of the public and its willingness to buy books however badly printed, they dared to make them poorer and poorer. They printed what we call “good” books, because ours are rose; but what they thought were poor ones, because older books had been so much better. This they did because they could sell them, and because they did not even realize what we know now—how wretchedly books can be made and still be sold! In short, the rank and file of early printers were not often actuated by conscious artistic standards, and they had trade conditions to struggle against, just as we have, and in an environment singularly like that of to-day.

Yet beautiful printing was done, and fine books were made, because there were few men among these early printers who were actuated by conscious artistic standards, and who made trade conditions helps, and not hindrances, to successful production. To print things suitably and well was the problem of the good printer then, just as it is now. The few printers and publishers who were then faithful to artistic and scholarly standards in the face of trade conditions are the men who did this, and the men we remember. As the Roman alphabet as opposed to other alphabets—as in certain famous types as opposed to other types—we see a survival of the fittest, so the printers whose names have survived have had a modest immortality because, though few, they were fit.

Apparently it was not so much conditions as personality and education that produced the fine books of early days. Typography was good then, and has been so, under varying circumstances, and at different periods, whenever it was practised patiently by educated men of trained taste, who had convictions and the courage of them. When we think of a Jenson or an Aldine book, a Pickering or a Morris edition, a definite typographical vision passes before the eye. All the greater printers had a conception of what they wanted to do. They did not permit themselves to be overwhelmed by trade conditions, by so-called practical considerations, by “good business,” or the hundred and one excuses which printers made for being too ignorant, too unimaginative, or too cowardly to do what the older men did. Nor were they pulled about by ignorant customers who wanted first this type and then that; and by obliging whom the work would have become merely a series of compromises. If they had allowed what some call standardless uneducated printers to-day allow, no individuality would have been left in their books to be remembered!

In every period there have been better or worse types employed in better or worse ways. The better types employed in better ways have been used by the educated printer acquainted with standards and history, directed by taste and a sense of the fitness of things, and facing the industrial conditions and the needs of his time. Such men have made of printing an art. The poorer types and methods have been employed by printers ignorant of standards and caring alone for commercial success. To these, printing has been simply a trade. The typography of a nation has been good or bad, as one or other of these classes had the supremacy. And to-day any intelligent printer can educate his taste, so to choose types for his work and so to use them, that he will help printing to be an art rather than a trade. There is not, as the sentimentalist would have us think, a specially devilish spirit now abroad that prevents good work from being done. The old times were not so very good, nor was human nature then so different, nor is the modern spirit particularly devilish. But it was, and is, hard to hold to a principle. The principles of the men of those times (since they require nothing whatever of us) seem simple and glorious. We do not dare to believe that we, too, can go and do likewise.

The outlook for typography is as good as ever it was—and much the same. Its future depends largely on the knowledge and taste of educated men. For a printer there are two camps, and only two, to be in: one, the camp of things as they are; the other, that of things as they should be. The first camp is on a level and extensive plain, and many eminently respectable persons lead lives of comfort therein; the sport is, however, inferior! The other camp is more interesting. Though on an inconvenient hill, it commands a wide view of typography, and in it are the class that help on sound taste in printing, because they are willing to make sacrifices for it. This group is small, accomplishes little comparatively, but has the one saving grace of honest endeavour—it tries. Like Religion,

it will remain a voice crying in the wilderness; but it will believe what it cries, and there will be some to listen to it in the future, as there have been many in the past.

Around this camp idealistic lunatics hover, but they are quite harmless, and were never known to hurt or print anything seriously. This camp I think the only one worth living in. You may not make all the money you want, but will have all you need, and moreover, you will have a tremendously good time; for as Stevenson said,

work that we really love is nothing more serious than play.

The practice of typography, if it be followed faithfully, is hard work—full of detail, full of petty restrictions, full of drudgery, and not greatly rewarded as men now count rewards. There are times when we need to bring to it all the history and art and feeling that we can, to make it bearable. But in the light of history, and of art, and of knowledge and of man’s achievement, it is as interesting a work as exists—a broad and humanizing employment which can indeed be followed merely as a trade, but which if perfected into an art, or even broadened into a profession, will perpetually open new horizons to our eyes and new opportunities to our hands.

the end

  1. Histoire Économique de l’Imprimerie. L’Imprimerie sous l’ancien Régime, 1439–1789, Paris, Hachette, 1905, pp. 2, 3.
  2. St. John the Evangelist is the traditional patron of printers and publishers, “comme celui qui fut le principal et le plus haut desdits secrétaires évangélistes de Notre Saveur.”
  3. Mellottée’s Histoire Économique de l’Imprimerie, pp. 401, 402.
  4. Mémoire sur les Vexations qu’exercent les Libraires et Imprimeurs de Paris, publié d’après l’imprimé de 1725 et le manuscrit de la Bibliothèque de la Ville de Paris par Lucien Faucou. Paris, 1879. For laws relating to bookselling and printing in Paris in the eighteenth century, see Code de La Libraire et Imprimerie de Paris, ou Conférence du Réglement arrêté au Conseil d’État du Roy, le 28 Febrier 1723…Avec les Anciennes Ordonnances, Édits, Déclarations, Arrêtes, Réglemens & Jugemens rendus au sujet de la Libraire & de l’Imprimerie , depuis l’an 1332, jusqu’à présent. À Paris, aux Dépens de la Communauté. 1744.
  5. Yet it must be remembered that a Latin poem was written by Henri Estienne II in 1569, entitled Artis Typographicæ Querimonia, de illiteratis quibusdam Typographis, propter quos in contemptum venit. It was translated into French by Lottin in 1785, the title reading, Plainte de la Typographie contre certains imprimeurs ignorans qui lui ont attiré le mépris où elle est tombée.
  6. Louis Moreri’s (1643–1680) Grand Dictionnaire historique, ou Mélange curieux de l’histoire sacrée et profane.
  7. Second of the three Jean Baptiste Coignards, all eminent Parisian printers, who held, among other posts, that of printers to the Académie Française.
  8. Joseph Barbou, of the eminent family of Barbou, printers at Lyons, Limoges, and Paris, who exercised their profession from 1524 to 1820. Most of Fournier’s books bear their imprint.
  9. According to Lottin, this was Christophe David II.
  10. Under such conditions, printers and publishers had recourse to all sorts of strategems to conceal their connections with a book. They invented names of imaginary cities for their imprints, to which they added equally imaginary publishers, non-existent streets, and absurd emblems which have caused no end of bewilderment to innocent readers.
  11. See Rombout’s Certificats délivrés aux Imprimeurs du Pays-Bas par Christophe Plantin. Antwerp, 1881.