In the mid-1700s, getting an education in England was a rich man’s game, mostly because a handful of wealthy London publishers held a ruthless monopoly on books. They artificially jacked up the prices of textbooks, literature, and law manuals so high that regular students and working-class people had absolutely no chance of buying them.
Down in the port city of Bristol, a loose network of rebellious printers decided they had seen enough. They realized the law couldn’t easily stop them if they moved fast.
They set up a shadow operation. They would smuggle a single, expensive copy of a mandatory book out of London. The second it arrived in Bristol, a team of printers would work through the night, manually setting type and running presses at lightning speed. They used cheaper paper and smaller fonts to cut costs.
By morning, thousands of bootleg, pocket-sized versions of the books were loaded onto the backs of carts. They sold them on street corners and out of the back of shops for a fraction of the London price. The London elite threw a massive fit, threatening lawsuits and prison time, but the Bristol pirates kept moving their printing presses to different basements. They shattered the monopoly, flooding the country with cheap knowledge and creating the original blueprint for internet file-sharing.
