I should soon have been bankrupt in business in 1884 if the public temper then had been like it is now—grasping, hustling, competitive…. Nobody asked for an estimate—indeed there was a fixed price for all the new work that was done. The only chance for me to make more profit would have been by lowering the quality of the output; and this the temper of the men made out of the question. But of profits I understood nothing. My great difficulty was to find out the customary price. The men didn’t know. I worked out long lists of prices from the old ledgers, as far as I could understand their technical terms.

—George Sturt, The Woodwright’s Shop (1923)