In France in several instances a Bishop, or the Canons of a Cathedral, arranged with a printer to come to the Cathedral town and print a missal or breviary under their supervision. These good men were perhaps rather amateur publishers than amateur printers working private presses with a hired man to do the heavy work. But if we choose to think of them only as customers, they were customers who knew what they wanted and brought the printer under their roof as the best means of seeing that they got it.
As regards the printing of secular books in the fifteenth century, since the craft was a new one, it was necessarily run in the first instance by men who had been brought up in other occupations. In this sense nearly every native printer outside Germany was an amateur. At the outset the newcomers were largely clerks in minor orders and professional scribes; but merchants, professors and men of letters generally were attracted to the new craft, many of them doubtless only to make money, others to print books in which they were specially interested. Even more than in the case of the bishops or canons who commissioned missals and breviaries, we must think of this motley crowd of recruits rather as amateur publishers than amateur printers. It may be doubted whether even Caxton (who was by trade a mercer) in all his fifteen years in the business, set up the equivalent of one of his small folios with his own hands. He started his press because he wanted to get his books into print as the easiest way of circulating them; but there are no signs that he took any special interest in fine printing for its own sake, or took any joy in producing a handsome book. His standards were those of a competent but unenterprising scribe, who only wanted to set his words down accurately on the page so that they could be easily read. The master printers all over the Continent of Europe, when they had the courage to stand out against the pressure to cut prices or increase profits by using cheaper and cheaper paper, and crowding more on to it, were doing much better work than Caxton, and when they found customers who encouraged them to do their best, their work altogether outclassed his.
When we turn to the scholar-printers of the sixteenth century I think it would be hard to deny the claim of Aldus and the Estiennes to a disinterested love of good printing, as well as a desire to get the books in which they were interested into print. It is true that the rich scholars of Italy and France were used to a high standard of excellence in the books, manuscript or printed, which they put on their shelves, but it is to the credit of Aldus and the Estiennes and Simon Colines and Geoffroy Tory that they catered also for the needs of less wealthy scholars, not by cheapening paper or crowding more old types on a page, but by designing, or causing to be designed, new fonts, with which they could print more economically without loss of beauty. Moreover, more especially at Lyons, the new ideals of compact printing, of the small book beautiful, were applied to printing not only in Greek and Latin, but in the vernacular, and these sixteenth century models can still be imitated without archaism or ostentation, which, when fifteenth century masterpieces are followed, are often difficult to avoid.