This would have been well enough in the eyes of the guild, if the hawkers had been content to buy from the legally patented booksellers.

But they began secretly to turn publishers in a small way on their own account.

Contraband was here, as always, the natural substitute for free trade.

They both issued pirated editions of their own, and they became the great purchasers and distributors of the pirated editions that came in vast bales from Switzerland, from Holland, from the Pope's country of Avignon.

To their craft or courage the public owed its copies of works whose circulation was forbidden by the government.