The authorities of the University of Paris exercised a very direct control from the outset over all the details of the business of making, renting, and selling books. This authority became in Paris a matter of much more immediate importance and abiding influence than in Bologna. In the latter, as we have seen, the business of the book-dealers was very closely limited to the production of the texts immediately required for the work of the class-room. In Paris, however, in the manuscript period, two and a half centuries before the introduction of the printing-press, the book-trade of the university had become in great measure the book-trade of the city. During a large part of this time, moreover, Paris shared with Florence the position of the centre of the intellectual activities of Europe. The scribes and their masters who were manifolding manuscripts in the Latin quarter, were not only supplying text-books to the students of the university, but were preparing literature for the scholarly readers of Paris, of France, and of Europe. The book-dealers of Paris constituted, however, for several centuries, with a few exceptions, a guild organised within the university. The members of this guild, the _libraires jurés_, were members of the university, and the operations of the guild were under the direct control of the university authorities. This arrangement gave to the book-dealers material advantages in the possession of university privileges and in the control of a practical monopoly of the business of producing books. It involved, however, certain corresponding disadvantages. University control meant supervision, censorship, restriction, regulation of prices, interference with trade facilities, and various hampering conditions which delayed very seriously, both before and after the introduction of printing, the development of the business of making and of circulating books, and, as a result of this, placed not a few obstacles in the way of the literary and the intellectual development of the community. Chevillier says: “The book-trade of Paris owes its origin to the university, by which, under the approval of the king, it was organised into an association of masters. This association was, from the outset, controlled directly by the university, from the authorities of which it received its statutes and regulations, and by which the master _libraires_ were licensed, _jurés_.”[276]