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. Originally the printer did everything except to make his paper and his presses. He designed and cast his type, he made his ink, he edited his manuscript, printed his books, bound them, and, for a time, sold them. We have just considered his relations to the bookseller. He got rid of his type casting about one hundred years after the invention. The type foundry of Guillaume Le Bé, established about 1551, seems to have been the beginning of type founding as a separate industry, although in later years some very large establishments maintained type foundries and even paper mills as incidents of the business; but the printer from this time on began to get his type outside. Bookbinding came to be regarded as a separate industry at about the same time.