In a study of the organisation of the earliest book-trade of Bologna and Paris and of the method under which the text-books for the universities were produced and supplied, I have attempted to indicate the part played by the universities in the history of literary production. In a later chapter I have presented sketches of one or two of the more noteworthy of the manuscript dealers, who carried on, for a couple of centuries prior to the invention of printing, the business of supplying books to the increasing circles of readers outside of the universities. In 1450 comes the invention of printing, which in revolutionising the methods of distributing intellectual productions, exercised such a complex and far-reaching influence on the thought and on the history of mankind. I have described with some detail the careers of certain of the earlier printer-publishers of Europe, and have been interested in noting how important and distinctive were the services rendered by these publishers to scholarship and to literature. The concluding chapter sketches the growth of the conception of the idea of property in literature, and the gradual development and extension throughout the States of Europe of the system of privileges which formed the precedent and the foundations for the modern system of the law of literature and of interstate copyright legislation. I have taken pleasure in pointing out that the responsibility for securing this preliminary recognition of property in literary productions and of the property rights of literary producers rested with the printer-publishers, and that the shaping of the beginnings of a copyright system for Europe is due to their efforts. It was they also who bore the chief burden of the contest, which extended over several centuries, for the freedom of the press from the burdensome censorship of Church and State, a censorship which in certain communities appeared likely for a time to throttle literary production altogether. I can but think that the historians of literature and the students of the social and political conditions on which literary production is so largely dependent, have failed to do full justice to men like Aldus, the Estiennes, Froben, Koberger, and Plantin, who fought so sturdily against the pretensions of pope, bishop, or monarch to stand between the printing-press and the people and to decide what should and what should not be printed.