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‘In fact, the two departments of compositor and corrector in the printing office were the direct representatives and successors of the scribe and corrector of manuscripts from the early times. The kind of men whom we find mentioned in the early printing offices as correctors, are just such men as would be sought for in earlier times in an important scriptorium. In our modern world, printed and written books have come to be looked upon as totally distinct things, whereas it is impossible to bring before our minds the state of things when books were first printed, until we look upon them as precisely the same. They were brought to fairs, or such general centres of circulation as Paris, Leipzig, or Frankfort, before the days of printing, just as afterwards, only that printing enabled the stationer to supply his buyers with much greater rapidity than before, and at much cheaper rates; so that the laws of supply and demand work together in such a manner that it is difficult to say which had more influence in accelerating the movement.’