An unregulated trade, conducted under conditions of absolute freedom approximating those of the present day, was not only out of place in the Middle Ages but was practically impossible. We have seen how the attempt to carry on a trade under such conditions resulted in a state of intolerable confusion in the printing industry. Accordingly a royal edict was issued by King Louis XII supplying the needed regulations for the conduct of the industry according to seventeenth century ideas.
So far as the industry itself was concerned the important feature of this edict was the organization of the Community of Printers. This Community embraced all the printing trades; that is to say, printing, book binding, type founding, and bookselling. The master workmen carrying on shops in any of these allied industries were members of the Community. It differed from the trade guilds in that it was an organization of employers only. It did not include even the master workmen who were not employers.
Certain matters were decided upon by the Community as a whole, but the work of the Community was carried on for the most part by a sort of Executive Committee called the Syndics. This Committee consisted of a chairman, who is usually referred to as the Syndic, and four associates or assessors. This board was chosen annually. Originally the elections were held in general assemblages of the industry at which all members of the Community were entitled to vote. Later the elections were in the hands of a board consisting of the five syndics for the year, past members of the board of syndics, and twenty-four electors. Of these twenty-four, eight were printers, eight booksellers, and eight binders. The type founders appear never to have been very important members of the Community and probably soon ceased to be represented among the syndics. At the time the Community was organized typefounding was not a separate industry, but was carried on by the printers themselves.
The duty of the syndics was to act as the corporate representatives of the industry. They fixed wages and prices. They adjusted disputes between their fellow-members and acted for the employers in dealing with the employees. They had powers of visitation and supervision. Through these they were supposed to exercise a sort of censorship over printing, to maintain the quality of work done, to see that trade regulations were enforced and trade agreements carried out; in a word, to exercise the same minute control over the industry which was exercised by the guilds.
The new organization was a very great improvement over the former lack of organization, but it was very far from being completely successful. Its first effort was to regulate admission to mastership and so to membership of the Community. The number of shops in Paris in 1618 was 76. By 1686 this number had been reduced to 36 and the process was still going on. At Troyes in 1700 there were 16 shops and in 1739 only 3. This limitation was brought about by freezing out the small shops, by strict regulation of admissions to the Community without which the business could not be legally carried on, and by the purchase from time to time of certificates of membership. A certificate of membership in the Community was a very considerable asset to an individual and on his death it passed to his heirs. While it could not apparently be sold outside the family, it had distinct value and could often be purchased and cancelled by the Community. Except by inheritances membership might be obtained only through advancement in the trade from apprenticeship through journeymanship to master workmanship, as we shall see later. The fees required for membership of the Community and the capital required for carrying on business were so great that very few attained membership of the Community in this way. Membership of the Community, however, was open to the sons of members or to those who might marry the widows of members, and in a very short time membership became practically limited to those who obtained it in one or the other of these ways.
The Community was undoubtedly very useful in giving a corporate center to the industry and also in giving more support to trade usages, contracts, and agreements. On the other hand its efficiency was greatly weakened by the quarrels which immediately broke out between the three elements of the Community and which lasted until the final break-up of the old conditions in 1789. The quarrel was mainly between the printers and the booksellers or publishers. The binders were soon recognized as forming an independent industry and they were before very long eliminated from the Community of Printers. They formed a Community of their own in 1686 and need not be further considered.
The hostility between the booksellers and the printers began with the invention of printing. Their interests were so closely related and yet so antagonistic that an attempt to combine them in one Community while at the same time keeping their functions separate resulted in constant quarrels and in a weakening of the influence of the Community itself.
The booksellers, for instance, were lax in their supervision and control in matters where the printers were directly concerned, while the printers were equally negligent of the interests of the booksellers. The printers naturally desired to restrict the number of printers but they were glad to see the number of booksellers competing for the privilege of handling their output increased indefinitely. The booksellers, being fewer in number and probably richer, were more united and more aggressive than the printers. They attempted to get control of manuscripts so that the printers could not produce anything without first paying toll to the owners of the manuscripts. We must always remember that at this period the great mass of commercial and periodical printing which supports the industry today was not in existence, and that printing was practically confined to books and official documents. The booksellers also wanted to print for themselves; that is to say, to hire journeymen printers and so make themselves independent of the master printers. By their resistence to the closing of the mastership and by the cultivation of competition they did their best to lower the prices of printing. In a word, they endeavored to subjugate the printers entirely. In this they did not succeed, but they kept the quarrel alive, very much to the detriment of the industry, until the end of the old industrial order.
CHAPTER VII
How The Old-time Printers Worked
Before considering the organization of a shop and the conditions under which the work was done, it is worth while to look into a printing establishment of the sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth century and see how the work itself was carried on. This general view of an old-time printing plant will be made fairly full even at the cost of some repetition of facts already stated elsewhere on account of the importance of presenting here as complete a picture as possible of the life and labor of printers in the centuries under discussion.