In the 'Skillet' thread there has been some incidental discussion of the word ‘gutters’ and of ‘gutter press’. All I can ascertain is the following, but the matter seems obscure and Snopes is silent:

The Gutter Press:

A colporteur is a person who sells goods in the street. The word seems to be connected, probably by alteration via the French ‘col’ for neck or collar, with the Old French ‘comporteur’, pedlar. Imagine goods sold from a tray supported by a strap around the neck (something I remember seeing in the East End of London just after WW 2. All those unemployed ex-servicemen).

Nowadays the word is used specifically to define an itinerant seller of religious tracts. The ‘colportage laws’ were passed at the time Scotland joined the Union (1707) and were intended to protect the sellers of dissenting religious literature should England become Catholic once more. The laws said that you did not require a licence in order to legally sell literature in the street. Newspaper sellers took advantage of this freedom and used it to hawk their papers from the pavements’ edges – hence the term ‘gutter press’.

That all sounds very nice, but I am really not convinced, and if anyone can add to it, please do.

Oh yes, colportage has been a wwftd (Hi tsuwm).

Gutter:

including the connection with candles, is easier:

Gutter - To make gutters or furrows. To flow in channels or streams.

Guttering – the channels placed round the edge of a roof to collect rainwater.
Also used to describe an unevenly or weakly burning candle resulting in unevenly melted wax at the top of the candle forming gutters that result in ribbons of wax running down the sides.