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Excerpt from Books and Their Makers During the Middle Agés, Vol. 2: A Study of the Conditions of the Production and Distribution of Literature From the Fall of the Roman Empire to the Close of the Seventeenth Century The responsibility for the selection of the books to be printed, with the exception of the controversial writings of the Reformation period, rested with the publishers of the time, and the direction of the literary interests of the book-reading public (still, of course, a very small fraction of the community) must have been not a little inuenced by the decisions arrived at by these publishers. I con elude, therefore, that the publishers of this period must have exerted a larger measure of inuence over the direc tion of scholarly investigation and in the shaping of the literary opinions of their age, than has been possible for publishers in the subsequent centuries after the produc tion of books had been enormously increased, and when all classes of the community had become readers. In these later times the direction of the literary interests of the diverse circles of the reading public came naturally into the hands of the contemporary writers. While the reissue of the accepted classics of previous generations remained (and must always remain) an important division of the business of publishing, an ever increasing propor tion of the work of the publishers came to be given to the comparatively routine work of distributing among readers the literature of the day, in the production of which lite rature the authors have, in part, led and directed, and, in part, simply followed and supplied the tastes and the demands of their readers. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst r